Reliability-Aware Resource Allocation and Binding in High-Level Synthesis

Soft error is nowadays a major reliability issue for nanoscale VLSI, and addressing it during high-level synthesis is essential to improve the efficiency of error mitigation. Motivated by the observation that for behavioral designs, especially control-flow intensive ones, variables and operations have non-uniform soft error vulnerabilities, we propose a novel reliability-aware allocation and binding technique to explore more effective soft error mitigation during high level synthesis. We first perform a comprehensive vulnerability analysis at the behavioral level by considering error propagation and masking in both control and data flows. Then the optimizations based on integer linear programming, as well as heuristic algorithm, are employed to incorporate the behavioral vulnerabilities into the register and functional unit binding phases to achieve cost-efficient error mitigation. The experimental results reveal that compared with the previous techniques which ignored behavioral vulnerabilities, the proposed approach can achieve up to 85% reliability improvement with the same amount of area budget in the RTL design.