Reliability-aware Operation Chaining in High Level Synthesis

System reliability becomes one of the major design concerns in nanoscale VLSI technologies. To cope with the increasing design complexity and the challenge of cost-efficient reliability improvement, modular and hierarchical optimizations are essential in the design space exploration. In this paper a novel scheduling and binding approach is proposed to investigate the potentials of reliability enhancement in high level synthesis. Inspired by the observation that the timing resource within individual clock cycle can be redistributed to maximize reliability, we propose a reliability-aware operation chaining technique, considering both the behavioral operation vulnerabilities and RTL reliability-cost tradeoffs in functional units. Using a characterized RTL component library regarding soft error, the experimental results show that compared to the traditional chaining, with the same timing constraint the proposed technique can generate the RTL with 3X reduction of the system failure rate, while introducing only 15% area and 16% power overhead.