Control Focused Soft Error Detection for Embedded Applications

Advances in integrated circuits present several key challenges in system reliability as soft errors are expected to increase with successive technology generations. Computing systems must be able to continue functioning in spite of these soft errors, necessitating the development of new methods for self-healing circuits that can detect and recover from these errors. We present an area-efficient control focused soft error detector (CNFSED) capable of nonintrusively detecting soft errors within the execution of a software application without modifications to the software application or the target processor. This soft error detector achieves an error detection rate greater than 90% for control errors and 85% of unmasked errors while incurring minimal area overhead.