Specification and synthesis of hardware checkpointing and rollback mechanisms

• Authors: Carven Chan;Daniel Schwartz-Narbonne;Divjyot Sethi;Sharad Malik
• Venue: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Design Automation Conference
• Year: 2012

The increasing pressure to make hardware resilient to runtime failures has prompted development of design techniques for specific classes of systems, e.g. processors and routers. However, these techniques come at increased design and verification costs, thus limiting their broader application. In this work we describe a methodology for general RTL designs based on the widely usable checkpointing and rollback resiliency mechanism. We take a modeling and language approach that provides an appropriate set of abstractions for the resiliency logic. This cleanly separates the main design behavior from the resiliency behavior, leading to ease of design. Further, as the language abstractions can be automatically synthesized into resiliency logic, our methodology can merge with existing design flows. The concerns of verifying this additional resiliency logic can be addressed by synthesizing behavioral assertions capturing correct behavior. We demonstrate the use of this methodology on four examples, with synthesis for performance and area to estimate the overhead of the additional synthesis logic.