Chordal fault-tolerance techniques in ring-connected parallel pipeline systems
1983
Signal processing systems 3ften use parallel pipeline type architectures to increase system throughpu~ . Although these systems are computationally efficient, they are unreliable from a fault-tolerance point of view. This paper presents a cost-efficient method of improving the reliability of ringconnected high-level data flow pipelines and linear computational pipelines through the use of single or multiple element bypass paths and the addition of one or more spare elements to the pipelines. Two configurations using this bypass technique are presented, the chordal ring and the linear bypass pipeline. Suggested reconfiguration techniques are explained and the terminology assoclzted with these architectures is defined. A reliability model that applies to both the ring and linear configurations is developed and studied. The bypass technique is compared with several other redundancy techniques, using reliability and a reliability performance factor. It is shown that the bypass technique provides a cost-efficient method of obtaining substantially improved reliability performance.