StageWeb: Interweaving Pipeline Stages into a Wearout and Variation Tolerant CMP Fabric

Manufacture-time process variation and life-time failure projections have become a major industry concern. Consequently, fault tolerance, historically of interest only for mission-critical systems, is now gaining attention in the mainstream computing space. Traditionally reliability issues have been addressed at a coarse granularity, e.g., by disabling faulty cores in chip multiprocessors. However, this is not scalable to higher failure rates. In this paper, the authors propose StageWeb, a fine-grained wearout and variation tolerance solution, that employs a reconfigurable web of replicated processor pipeline stages to construct dependable many-core chips.