ETComp
Error-Tolerant Compression
Error Tolerant Compression studies the effect of faults in the multimedia compression systems, i.e. video, image and audio system. Classical manufacturing test for digital chips classifies chips into two categories: perfect and imperfect. Our work is motivated by the notion that in some instances imperfect chips can be used, as long as they introduce “acceptable errors�. Error tolerance (ET) leads to a relaxation of the requirement of 100% correctness for devices and interconnects, which may dramatically reduce costs for manufacturing, verification, and testing. Categorizing chips into acceptable and unacceptable also leads to increases in yield rate. Determining what constitutes acceptable degradation in system performance is obviously an applicationspecific decision; both performance criteria and acceptability thresholds are highly dependent on the application.
In this project we consider multimedia compression systems as a promising application area for our proposed ET concepts. This is because i) many multimedia compression systems are deployed in consumer devices, for which maintaining low costs is important, and ii) compression itself leads to a lossy representation of signals, so that the effect of system faults can be viewed as an additional source of “noise� or representation error. As an example, we studied a complete MPEG video encoder indicates that several of its building blocks, in particular its Motion Estimation (ME) component, and discrete cosine transform (DCT) are such that some hardware faults lead to acceptable degradation at the system outputs.
- Publication
- I. Chong and A. Ortega, "Hardware Testing For Error Tolerant Multimedia Compression based on Linear Transforms". In Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems (DFT), Monterey, October 2005.PDF format
- H. Chung and A. Ortega, "Analysis and testing for error tolerant motion estimation". In Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems (DFT), Monterey, October 2005.PDF format
- People
