Resiliency in Digital Processing Systems

Reliability in integrated circuits (ICs) has been an important topic for many years. Numerous methods for achieving reliability in ICs have been proposed. Nevertheless, the traditional approaches come with significant overhead and are not optimal for complex dynamic digital systems, which we have today. Today’s systems should be resilient - they need to dynamically react to intrinsic and environmental changes, and ideally be able to predict the possible threats even before they appear. This paper provides an overview on how to approach the resiliency in digital processing systems. The resilient approach is demonstrated in a fabricated IC based on RISC-V architecture, supporting on-chip fault sensing and dynamic system adaptation.