Mitigation of Transient Faults and Timing Variations in GALS Circuits

There will be a talk by Jakob Lechner in the RiSE seminar series on May 8, 2014.

ABSTRACT

In this talk we investigate fault-tolerance mechanisms applied to GALS-style circuits. GALS, short for globally asynchronous locally synchronous, is a design paradigm, which partitions a complex circuit into several locally synchronized modules and performs data transfers between these modules by means of asynchronous handshake channels. This is a systematic approach to reduce timing dependencies in circuits and therefore ease their physical implementation. Following the fundamental structure of GALS circuits, this talk is organised in two parts: First, we will present a modular redundant GALS architecture with a new state restoration scheme, which was tailored to preserve the desired temporal and physical independence for replicated units. In the second part we then analyse the resilience of delay-insensitive codes against transient faults and propose coding techniques for implementation of robust asynchronous communication channels.