Behavioral-level synthesis of heterogeneous BISR reconfigurable ASIC's

In this paper, behavioral-level synthesis techniques are presented for the design of reconfigurable hardware. The techniques are applicable for synthesis of several classes of designs, including: (1) design for fault tolerance against permanent faults, (2) design for Improved manufacturability, and (3) design of application specific programmable processors (ASPPs)-processors designed to perform any computation from a specified set on a single implementation platform. This paper focuses on design techniques for efficient built-in self-repair (BISR), and thus directly addresses the former two applications. Previous BISR techniques have been based on replacing a failed module with a backup of the same type. We present new heterogeneous BISR methodologies which remove this constraint and enable replacement of a module with a spare of a different type. The approach is based on the flexibility of behavioral-level synthesis to explore the design space. Two behavioral synthesis techniques are developed; the first method is through assignment and scheduling, and the second utilizes transformations. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the approaches.