A Novel Parallel Deadlock Detection Algorithm and Hardware for Multiprocessor System-on-a-Chip

Given the projected dramatic increase in the number of processors and resources in a system-on-a-chip, a quadratic increase in the likelihood of deadlock is predicted due to complex system behavior. To deal with this issue, we here present a novel parallel hardware-oriented deadlock detection algorithm with O(1) deadlock detection and O(min(m,n)) preparation, where m and n are the numbers of processes and resources, respectively. Our contributions are (i) the first O(1) deadlock detection hardware implementation and (ii) a new algorithmic method of achieving O(min(m,n)) overall run-time complexity. We implement our algorithm in Verilog HDL and demonstrate that deadlock detection always takes only two clock cycles regardless of the size of a system (i.e., m and n).