Mar 18, 2011 15:51 GMT  ·  By

While miniaturization allows chip manufacturers to build ever more powerful and energy efficient processors it can also have a negative effect on the CPU's reliability, so researchers of the CRISP consortium have developed and demonstrated a self-testing and self-repairing chip that could improve the reliability of future processors.

The CRISP consortium consists of Recore Systems (project leader), University of Twente, Atmel Automotive, Thales Netherlands, Tampere University of Technology, and NXP Semiconductors and the chip was demonstrated at the DATE 2011 conference.

“Because of the rapidly growing transistor density on chips, it has become a real challenge to ensure high system dependability,” said Hans Kerkhoff, Associate Professor, CTIT, University of Twente.

To get past these problems, the chip developed by the CRISP consortium combines a test for faulty components and connections with a run-time resource manager.

This is used to assign tasks and communication channels to known-good components and pathways and ensures that the chip will continue working even when faulty components are detected.

Furthermore, the chip packs many processing cores and each core performs subtasks of a more complex application.

These subtasks are also allocated by the run-time resource manager, which is used to dynamically determine which core does which task and that can even swap tasks between cores while an application is being run.

“Combining testing for faulty components and a run-time resource manager forms the heart of a flexible reconfigurable chip, that can handle changing tasks and failing components during its entire fit life.” said Bart Vermeulen, senior principal scientist at NXP.

Right now, it is still unclear how much time will pass until the technology is ready for prime time, but judging by the details available I guess the wait will be worth it.