@inproceedings{SegabinazziFerreiraNolteVargasetal.2020, author = {Segabinazzi Ferreira, Raphael and Nolte, J{\"o}rg and Vargas, Fabian and George, Nevin and H{\"u}bner, Michael}, title = {Run-time hardware reconfiguration of functional units to support mixed-critical applications}, doi = {10.1109/LATS49555.2020.9093692}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:co1-opus4-51804}, year = {2020}, abstract = {System reconfiguration of hardware resources has been done in multiple system domains. Such systems are usually found in the context of FPGAs, where reconfiguration is done usually over its primitives (e.g., LUTs, Flip-Flops). Or even in the context of MPSoC designs, where core management (e.g., lock-step operation in multi-core designs) is the most used approach. However, recent works have shown that configuration at Functional Units (FUs) granularity might come with benefits. For example, it can increase the configuration space due to its finer granularity, and, as a consequence, the options to deal with problems (e.g., due to aging) in the units itself. Within this context, this paper presents a system capable to configure its FUs (e.g., ALUs, multipliers, dividers) into different operation modes. The system uses an Operating System to control HW reconfiguration during process switching time and takes into account the health state of its units in a mixed-criticality applications scenario. Results show that, within this scenario, the system is able to reconfigure itself accomplishing health state modifications of its HW elements.}, subject = {Reconfiguration; Functional units; Fine-grained; Mixed-criticality; Run-time; Rekonfiguration; Laufzeit; Funktionseinheit; Fehlererkennung}, language = {en} } @inproceedings{SegabinazziFerreiraNolte2019, author = {Segabinazzi Ferreira, Raphael and Nolte, J{\"o}rg}, title = {Low latency reconfiguration mechanism for fine-grained processor internal functional units}, doi = {10.1109/LATW.2019.8704560}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:co1-opus4-50497}, year = {2019}, abstract = {The strive for performance, low power consumption, and less chip area have been diminishing the reliability and the time to fault occurrences due to wear out of electronic devices. Recent research has shown that functional units within processors usually execute a different amount of operations when running programs. Therefore, these units present different individual wear out during their lifetime. Most existent schemes for re-configuration of processors due to fault detection and other processor parameters are done at the level of cores which is a costly way to achieve redundancy. This paper presents a low latency (approximately 1 clock cycle) software controlled mechanism to reconfigure units within processor cores according to predefined parameters. Such reconfiguration capability delivers features like wear out balance of processor functional units, configuration of units according to the criticality of tasks running on an operating system and configurations to gain in performance (e.g. parallel execution) when possible. The focus of this paper is to show the implemented low latency reconfiguration mechanism and highlight its possible main features.}, subject = {Functional units low latency; Fine-grained; Reconfiguration; Software; Rekonfiguration; Mikroprozessor; Latenzzeit }, language = {en} }