Cost-effective slack allocation for lifetime improvement in NoC-based MPSoCs

Wear-out related permanent faults are projected to make system lifetime a critical issue for all designs. In embedded systems, lifetime can be increased using slack , underutilization in execution and storage resources, so that when components fail, data and tasks can be re-mapped and re-scheduled. The design space of possible slack allocation is both large and complex. However, based on the observation that useful slack is often quantized , we have developed an approach that effectively and efficiently allocates execution and storage slack to jointly optimize system lifetime and cost. While exploring less than 1.4% of the slack allocation design space, our approach consistently outperforms alternative slack allocation techniques to find sets of designs within 1.4% of the lifetime-cost Pareto-optimal front.