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Inducing Non-uniform FPGA Aging Using Configuration-based Short Circuits

Published:06 June 2022Publication History
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Abstract

This work demonstrates a novel method of accelerating FPGA aging by configuring FPGAs to implement thousands of short circuits, resulting in high on-chip currents and temperatures. Patterns of ring oscillators are placed across the chip and are used to characterize the operating frequency of the FPGA fabric.

Over the course of several months of running the short circuits on two-thirds of the reconfigurable fabric, with daily characterization of the FPGA 6 performance, we demonstrate a decrease in FPGA frequency of 8.5%. We demonstrate that this aging is induced in a non-uniform manner. The maximum slowdown outside of the shorted regions is 2.1%, or about a fourth of the maximum slowdown that is experienced inside the shorted region. In addition, we demonstrate that the slowdown is linear after the first two weeks of the experiment and is unaffected by a recovery period.

Additional experiments involving short circuits are also performed to demonstrate the results of our initial experiments are repeatable. These experiments also use a more fine-grained characterization method that provides further insight into the non-uniformed nature of the aging caused by short circuits.

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      • Published in

        cover image ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
        ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems  Volume 15, Issue 4
        December 2022
        476 pages
        ISSN:1936-7406
        EISSN:1936-7414
        DOI:10.1145/3540252
        • Editor:
        • Deming Chen
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 6 June 2022
        • Online AM: 11 February 2022
        • Accepted: 1 February 2022
        • Revised: 1 October 2021
        • Received: 1 June 2021
        Published in trets Volume 15, Issue 4

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