A novel deadlock avoidance algorithm and its hardware implementation

Abstract

This work proposes a deadlock avoidance algorithm (DAA) and its hardware implementation, the deadlock avoidance unit (DAU), as an intellectual property (IP) core that provides a mechanism for very fast and automatic deadlock avoidance in multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MP-SoC) with multiple (e.g., 10) processing elements and multiple (e.g., 40) resources. The DAU avoids deadlock by not allowing any grant or request that leads to a deadlock. In case of livelock, the DAU asks one of the processes involved in the livelock to release resource(s) so that the livelock can also be resolved. We simulated two realistic examples that can benefit from the DAU, and demonstrated that the DAU not only avoids deadlock in a few clock cycles but also achieves a 37% speed-up of application execution time over avoiding deadlock in software. Finally, the SoC area overhead due to the DAU is small, under 0.01% in our example.