Control signal protection: a new challenge for high performance processors

This paper deals with the protection of control signals - the detection and fast correction of soft errors in the global control logic, control signal lines or control signal pipelines of microprocessors. As detection techniques, we compare different duplication and prediction schemes for control logic. We discuss several error correction techniques with respect to their suitability for the correction of control signal errors in high-performance processor architectures. We investigated different rollback methods which work with the re-execution of data path operations with a variable rollback distances or a selective control signal repetition. A complete solution for a distributed control signal observation and recovery (protection) scheme with regards to architectural conditions of high-performance processors is proposed.