Reliability Exploration of System-on-Chip With Multi-Bit-Width Accelerator for Multi-Precision Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks (DNNs) in safety-critical applications demand high reliability even when running on edge-computing devices. Recent works on System-on-Chip (SoC) design with state-of-the-art (SOTA) hardware artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators and corresponding multi-bit-width (MBW) convolutional neural network (CNN) generation strategies show that MBW CNNs can effectively explore the trade-off between network accuracy and hardware efficiency. However, reliability has not been considered in such trade-off analysis, even though highly quantized CNNs may elevate the impact of bit flips in the hardware. Also, the reliability of the microcontroller and its interface operating with the AI accelerator are not studied. This work evaluates the reliability of DNN computation in an SoC that includes a processor, SOTA AI accelerator, and NN models highly optimized for computation efficiency using a neural architecture search (NAS) method. Focusing on neutron-induced soft error, which is the primary source of bit-flip errors in a terrestrial environment, we perform fault injection and neutron beam experiments. For these experiments, we prototype the SoC on a flash-based FPGA platform, in which the configuration memory is robust to neutron irradiation. Then, we analyze the experimental data and identify vulnerable components in the system. Furthermore, we evaluate how the SoC running different NAS-optimized MBW LeNet5 networks impact the performance, radiation sensitivity, failure rate of MBW accelerator, and crash rate of the system on the FPGAs. Our results show that instruction and data tightly coupled memory (I/DTCM) are the most vulnerable parts and the control status registers (CSRs) in our accelerator are the second most vulnerable component. Moreover, MBW networks have higher susceptibility to critical errors than single-precision networks, low-precision data are more likely to affect the classification results, and the high bits are more sensitive to faults.