New Way to Patch Defective Hardware

brunascle writes "Researchers have devised a new way to patch hardware. By treating a computer chip more like software than hardware, Josep Torrellas, a computer science professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, believes we will be able to fix defective hardware by a applying a patch, similar to the way defective software is handled. His system, dubbed Phoenix, consists of a standard semiconductor device called a field programmable gate array (FPGA). Although generally slower than their application-specific integrated circuit counterparts, FPGAs have the advantage of being able to be modified post-production. Defects found on a Phoenix-enabled chip could be resolved by downloading a patch and applying it to the hardware. Torrellas believes this would give chips a shorter time to market, saying "If they know that they could fix the problems later on, they could beat the competition to market.""

Comments

what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I see what this guy is doing that is novel. I can't tell if it's a stupid writeup or if this guy really thinks sending out a new bitstream to an FPGA is a breakthrough. FPGAs are remarkable pieces of hardware, and depending on how much you're willing to spend they can run up to a few hundred megahertz- though timing problems can be difficult to resolve at that kind of speed. Many ASIC designers use FGPAs in house to prototype and can afford to spend up to $25,000 for a single chip (only the craziest number of gates cost that much) but which reduces the number of million dollar ASIC production runs. The other reason you don't see a whole lot of FPGAs in closed source hardware is because an end user/hacker could make the hardware go out of spec or do something unintended and then expect warranty support. An increasing number of open source hardware projects (Universal Software Radio Peripheral, or USRP, for one) include FPGAs however. Anyway, bottom line is I just don't see from the article at least what this guy is doing that is so special. The article makes it sound like the chip can detect the errors itself but then requires a patch to be uploaded. It sounds to me like he's adding logic that works around certain hardware states in the fixed portions of the circuit- but that's just updating the VHDL/Verilog and creating a new bitstream. So again, I don't know if it's a dumb article or a dumb researcher. Anyone have more information?