Cross-Layer Error Resilience for Robust Systems

A large class of robust electronic systems of the future must be designed to perform correctly despite hardware failures. In contrast, today's mainstream systems typically assume error-free hardware. Classical fault-tolerant computing techniques are too expensive for this purpose. This paper presents an overview of new techniques that can enable a sea change in the design of cost-effective robust systems. These techniques utilize globally-optimized cross-layer approaches, i.e., across device, circuit, architecture, runtime, and application layers, to overcome hardware failures.