Soft Error Analysis and Mitigation at High Abstraction Levels Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Ingenieurwissenschaften von der Fakultät für Informatik des Karlsruher Instituts für Technologie (KIT) genehmigte Dissertation von Liang Chen aus Henan, China Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: June 19, 2015 Referent: Prof. Dr. Mehdi Baradaran Tahoori, KIT Korreferent: Dr. Dan Alexandrescu, iRoC Technologies Acknowledgments Completing the PhD is a long expedition for me, during which I underwent unforgettable life experience: from daunting and discouraging periods after bitter frustrations on research and publications, to the comforting and reassuring moments after fruitful project progress and final acknowledgment from the research community. Standing at the destination point and looking back at the old times, I want to express my deepest gratitude to all the people accompanying me in this journey. First and foremost I want to give the sincere thanks to my advisor Prof. Mehdi Tahoori. During the more than 4 years PhD period, his visionary advice on my research directions, his continuous care of my research progress as well as his patient efforts to improve my research capabilities are the prerequisites for my successful completeness of this dissertation today. In addition, his encouragement after research difficulties and paper rejections, the valuable op- portunities he provided for communications with scientific experts as well as industry leaders during international conferences or workshops, are other indispensable factors for my profes- sional and personal development. In particular, during the internship at iRoC I met Dr. Dan Alexandrescu and had impressive working experience with him. His extraordinary expertise in my research period, the inspiring discussion with him on the cutting edge industry progress, and the efforts he spent as the second advisor during the graduation progress are all highly appreciated. Furthermore, I want to thank all the colleagues in our Chair of Dependable Nano Computing (CDNC). Their responsible and kind-hearted help in both working and personal aspects facil- itated my research activities in CDNC, as well as my living experience in Karlsruhe. Among them I would like to give special gratitude to Mojtaba Ebrahimi, with whom I had very close research collaborations in the past years. His inspiring advices during idea formulation, his consistent help in the implementations, paper writing and polishing have made significant contributions to my PhD achievements. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the funding sources that made my PhD work possible: the DFG SPP1500 Priority Program “PERICES: Providing Efficient Reliability in Critical Embedded Systems”. I am also very grateful to my friend and senior Dr. Bing Li from Technical University Munich, who gave me essential advices and encouragement to go through the toughest period during my PhD study. Last but not least, I want to thank my parents and sister who are accompanying me with endless love all the time. No matter what happens, they are always supporting me and standing on my side, which is the root source of all my power and passion in the life. Liang Chen Haid-und-Neu Str. 62 76131 Karlsruhe Hiermit erkläre ich an Eides statt, dass ich die von mir vorgelegte Arbeit selbstständig verfasst habe, dass ich die verwendeten Quellen, Internet-Quellen und Hilfsmittel vollständig angegeben haben und dass ich die Stellen der Arbeit - einschließlich Tabellen, Karten und Abbildungen - die anderen Werken oder dem Internet im Wortlaut oder dem Sinn nach entnommen sind, auf jeden Fall unter Angabe der Quelle als Entlehnung kenntlich gemacht habe. Karlsruhe, Juli 2015 ——————————— Liang Chen ABSTRACT With the rapid advance of semiconductor technology in the past several decades, computing systems already become indispensable parts of our society. The main driving forces behind the prevalent usage of these systems are their boosting performance and continuous integration of sophisticated functionalities. However, alongside with the aggressive downscaling of the transistor feature size in these systems, the current and future technologies are facing serious reliability challenges, which mandate a new paradigm to take reliability into consideration during the entire system design flow to achieve cost-efficient reliable computing. One of the major reliability issues is radiation-induced soft error, which is a type of transient fault during the system operation, and it is caused by charge collection after the transistor is struck by the energetic particles from packaging materials or cosmic rays. Soft errors are not reproducible and can severely corrupt the system data integrity. The previous soft error mitigation solutions at low abstraction levels are very costly, because they stay at the end of the design stack and the useful high level application semantics for error abstraction and the corresponding error masking effects are totally ignored. In contrast, at high abstract levels there are significant potentials for cost-effective solutions, because the reliability metric are considering earlier in the design phase, and the larger flexibility in the design space exploration can be leveraged. This thesis presents several novel and efficient techniques for soft error evaluation and mitigation at high abstract levels, i.e. from register transfer level up to behavioral algorithmic level. For error evaluation, first we perform sophisticated correlation analysis during the propagation process of multiple errors, which enables the appropriate error abstraction from logic level to register transfer level. Then at register transfer level, according to different error propagation properties, the data and control paths are carefully analyzed with analytical and formal techniques, respectively. Finally at the algorithmic level, the soft error evaluation is comprehensively performed by considering branch probabilities and functional semantics using the probabilistic model checking technique. Based on previous detailed soft error evaluation, cost-efficient error mitigation solutions based on selective protection are investigated during the high level synthesis process. We develop a versatile reliability-aware synthesis framework regarding the allocation and bind- ing of hardware modules (in the spatial domain), and the scheduling of behavioral operations (in the temporal domain), which can generate low-cost reliability-enhanced hardware imple- mentations at register transfer level. This synthesis framework features the comprehensive consideration of the reliability metrics at both low and high abstraction levels, i.e. intrin- sic soft error rates of hardware modules and algorithmic error vulnerabilities of behavioral variables and operations. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is demonstrated with extensive synthesis experiments, which show that compared with the state-of-the-art solutions, our techniques can achieve much higher system reliability with the same hardware overhead, i.e. more cost-efficient reliability enhancement. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG Bedingt durch die schnell voranschreitende Entwicklung der Halbleitertechnologie in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten sind Computersystem mittlerweile essentielle Bestandteile unserer Gesellschaft. Der Hauptgründe für diesen Erfolg und die gängige Nutzung solcher Systeme ist die kontinuierlich wachsende Leistungsfähigkeit und die Integration von immer mehr sowie immer ausgeklügelteren Funktionen. Um dies zu ermöglichen werden die Transistordimensio- nen mit jeder Generation weiter verkleinert. Dies bringt allerdings auch zahlreiche Heraus- forderungen mit sich. So sind aktuelle und zukünftige Technologiegenerationen grossen Zuver- lässigkeitsherausforderungen ausgesetzt, weshalb die Zuverlässigkeit von Computersystemen als Paradigma in allen Phasen des gesamten Entwicklungszyklus solcher Systeme beachtet werden muss. Eine der wichtigsten Zuverlässigkeitsherausforderungen sind “Soft Errors” verursacht durch Strahlung. Dabei handelt es sich um transiente Fehler, die während des Betriebs auftreten, und durch Treffer von hochenergetischen Teilchen aus dem Verpackungsmaterial oder aus kosmis- cher Strahlung hervorgerufen werden. “Soft Errors” können daher nicht reproduziert werden. Darüber hinaus können sie die Datenintegrität des betroffenen Systems stark beeinträchti- gen. Die bisherigen Lösungsansätze konzentrieren sich auf die untersten Abstraktionsschichten und sind daher sehr kostspielig, da in solchen Methoden “Soft Errors” nur am Ende des De- signzyklus beachtet werden und nützliche Informationen von höheren Abstraktionsebenen nicht berücksichtigt werden. Dennoch haben höhere Abstraktionsebenen ein grosses Potential um zu einer effektiven Problemlösung beizutragen, da die Zuverlässigkeitsprobleme bereits in frühen Phasen des Entwicklungszyklus betrachtet werden können und zudem ein grösserer Suchraum für Lösungsansätze besteht. In dieser Dissertation werden neue Ansätze zur Modellierung und zur Problemlösung für “Soft Errors” auf höheren Abstraktionsebenen (von Register-Transfer-Ebene bis zur Algorithmen- Ebene) vorgestellt. Um eine geeignete Abstraktion der Fehlermechanismen zu erreichen, müssen dazu die Korrelationen von diversen Fehlerursachen auf Logikebene untersucht wer- den. Anschliessend folgt eine weitere Abstraktion auf Register-Transfer-Ebene, auf der die Daten- und Kontrollpfade mit Hilfe von analytischen sowie formalen Methoden analysiert wer- den. Schlussendlich wird eine “Soft Error” Evaluierung auf noch höheren Abstraktionsebenen