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Automated Replacement of State-Holding Flip-Flops to Enable Non-Volatile Checkpointing

Kreß, Fabian ORCID iD icon 1; Pfau, Johannes ORCID iD icon 1; Kempf, Fabian 1; Schmidt, Patrick 1; He, Zhuofan 2; Harbaum, Tanja ORCID iD icon 1; Becker, Jürgen 1
1 Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung (ITIV), Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
2 Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Abstract (englisch):

Applications in safety-critical areas like automotive or aerospace require functions to handle system failures. A commonly used technique on different system levels is checkpointing, which enables a rollback in such an event. However, at register level, power failures cause CMOS flip-flops to lose data, requiring a complete reboot instead of a fast rollback.In this paper, we propose the use of hybrid volatile/non-volatile flip-flops to prevent data loss on power shortages. To reduce the area overhead introduced by those, we present our automated toolchain based on open-source tools to find potential state-holding flip-flops in a netlist and implement those as hybrid volatile/non-volatile for checkpointing. This approach not only reduces area overhead and improves resiliency, but also enables aggressive power-gating strategies to increase energy efficiency.Exemplary, we test our toolchain for three RISC-V based processors and verify our results in simulation. Thereby, we can show that our proposed approach is able to determine all state-holding flip-flops in each architecture.


Originalveröffentlichung
DOI: 10.1109/NorCAS58970.2023.10305469
Zugehörige Institution(en) am KIT Institut für Technik der Informationsverarbeitung (ITIV)
Publikationstyp Proceedingsbeitrag
Publikationsdatum 31.10.2023
Sprache Englisch
Identifikator ISBN: 979-83-503-3757-0
KITopen-ID: 1000163973
Erschienen in 2023 IEEE Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference (NorCAS), 31st October - 1st November 2023, Aalborg, Denmark
Veranstaltung IEEE Nordic Circuits and Systems Conference (NorCAS 2023), Aalborg, Dänemark, 31.10.2023 – 01.11.2023
Verlag Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Seiten 1–7
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