A Heuristically Mechanical Model for Accurate and Fast Soft Error Analysis

Characterizing the soft error impacts is significant for a good trade off between design cost (e.g. Area and power) and reliability. In this paper, a heuristically mechanical model is proposed to quantify the soft error metric Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) of storage structures (e.g. Register file and Cache) efficiently. This model not only considers the error spread among successive read operations, but also captures the logical masking effects of ALU unit, where errors propagate from the storage structure. The results of SPEC2000 INT demonstrate that, compared with the state-of-the-art method, the proposed model achieves a more accurate AVF estimation by up to 98.18% and on average 79.14% via only one more simulation for simple profiling.