Abstract: Approaches for reducing undesired chaotic behavior, improving security and/or reliability and/or decreasing performance excursions in an integrated circuit, system or group of systems. According to one aspect, a whitening functional unit is coupled to a first functional unit and acts to perturb the operation of the first functional unit in a substantially non-deterministic manner. For some aspects, the whitening functional unit may be responsive to events, control information, temporal information, one or more counters and/or other indicia to perturb the operation of the first functional unit.

Abstract: An optical and/or electrical communication and structural fabric, method and system. For one aspect, an optical fabric is embedded within a structure to communicate an optical and/or electrical signal and to stiffen the structure. The structure may be a circuit board, for example, and the optical cloth may be used to interconnect devices coupled to the circuit board. For another aspect, the structure may be a different type of structure such as, for example, part of a vehicle, airplane or other structure.

Abstract: A correlated logic micro cache and approach for correlated logic micro-caching. For one aspect, logic coupled to an output node is provided to at least initiate computation of an output value in response to receiving an input value at an input node. A correlated logic micro cache is provided to store information sufficient to recover a first input value associated with the input node and a first output value associated with the first input value. If a second input value to be applied at the input node matches the first input value stored in the correlated logic micro cache, the first output value is to be applied at the output node and computation by the logic is to be halted.

Abstract: A self-rewinding circuit includes a first block of combinatorial logic having a set of inputs including at least one input and a set of outputs including at least one output wherein a relationship between the set of inputs and the set of outputs is defined by a first input-output function. A first rewind circuit is coupled between the set of outputs and the set of inputs to implement an inversion of the input-output function.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for utilizing multiple microcode flow synonyms or hardware flow synonyms for an instruction is disclosed. In one embodiment, a microcode synonym is created for execution on two or more execution units of differing types. One microcode synonym may be chosen for execution depending upon the availability status of the execution units. In another embodiment, several microcode synonyms may be chosen for execution. The results of the first microcode synonym to complete execution may be retired. If the results of execution of two microcode synonyms do not match, a fault exception may be raised.