Research project looks to repairing working chips
A run-time resource manager self-repairs the chip and reconfigures the chip’s tasks to fault-free parts in real time.
The research team was able to ascertain how chips can test and repair themselves. The methodology combines a test for faulty components and connections on chips with a run-time resource manager which assigns tasks and communication channels to known-good components and pathways.
This allows many-core chips with some faulty cores to pass production test, since they will function for the full 100 percent without any compromise to reliability, according to the Crisp consortium.
"Chips can function with faulty components by developing architectures of multiple cores that can degrade while they keep functioning,’ according to Hans Kerkhoff, Associate Professor, CTIT, University of Twente.
A run-time resource manager dynamically determines which core does which task and swaps tasks from failing cores to let the chip repair itself, said Kerkhoff.
The resource manager continuously determines the chip’s optimum Quality of Service on fault-free components, according to Bart Vermeulen, Senior Principal Scientist at NXP, one of the consortium’s company partners.
The resource manager dynamically assigns new tasks to free resources during the entire chip lifetime.
Crisp which stands for Cutting edge Reconfigurable ICs for Stream Processing is a European Union project that researches optimal utilization, efficient programming and dependability of reconfigurable many-cores for streaming applications.
The project consortium consists of Recore Systems (project leader), University of Twente, Atmel Automotive, Thales Netherlands, Tampere University of Technology, and NXP Semiconductors.
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