Software adaptation in quality sensitive applications to deal with hardware variability

Authors:
Aashish Pant;Puneet Gupta;Mihaela van der Schaar
Affiliations:
University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA;University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA;University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 20th symposium on Great lakes symposium on VLSI
Year:
2010

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Abstract

In this work, we propose a method to reduce the impact of process variations by adapting the application's algorithm at the software layer. We introduce the concept of hardware signatures as the measured post manufacturing hardware characteristics that can be used to drive software adaptation across different die. Using H.264 encoding as an example, we demonstrate significant yield improvements (as much as 40% points at 0% over-design), a reduction in over-design (by as much as 10% points at 80% yield) as well as application quality improvements (about 2.6dB increase in average PSNR at 80% yield). Further, we investigate implications of limited information exchange (i.e. signature measurement granularity) on yield and quality. We show that our proposed technique for determining optimal signature measurement points results in an improvement in PSNR of about 1.3dB over naive sampling for the H.264 encoder. We conclude that hardware-signature based application adaptation is an easy and inexpensive (to implement), better informed (by actual application requirements) and e ffective way to manage yield-cost-quality tradeoffs in application-implementation design flows.