2 research outputs found
Efficient protection of the pipeline core for safety-critical processor-based systems
The increasing number of safety-critical commercial
applications has generated a need for components with high
levels of reliability. As CMOS process sizes continue to shrink,
the reliability of ICs is negatively affected since they become
more sensitive to transient faults. New circuit designs must take
this fact into consideration, and incorporate adequate protection
against the effects of transient faults. This paper presents a
novel method for protecting the pipelined execution unit of an
embedded processor. It is based on a self-configured architecture
with hybrid redundancy that can mask single and multiple
errors, which can occur on storage elements due to transient
or permanent faults. This concept can be easily applied to any
processing architecture of this nature with a high safety integrity
level. Results from error-injection experiments are also reported
that show that this design can maintain a non-interrupted and
failure-free operation under single and double errors with a
probability that exceeds 99.4%
Study of the effects of SEU-induced faults on a pipeline protected microprocessor
This paper presents a detailed analysis of the behavior of a novel fault-tolerant 32-bit embedded CPU as compared to a
default (non-fault-tolerant) implementation of the same processor during a fault injection campaign of single and double faults. The
fault-tolerant processor tested is characterized by per-cycle voting of microarchitectural and the flop-based architectural states,
redundancy at the pipeline level, and a distributed voting scheme. Its fault-tolerant behavior is characterized for three different
workloads from the automotive application domain. The study proposes statistical methods for both the single and dual fault injection
campaigns and demonstrates the fault-tolerant capability of both processors in terms of fault latencies, the probability of fault
manifestation, and the behavior of latent faults