A two-order increase in robustness of partial redundancy under radiation stress test by using SDC prediction

Partial redundancy is a method to address errors from single event effects (SEEs) on critical data while leaving less important data unprotected for energy consumption tradeoffs. Under a low SEE rate, the method can provide a good cost-effective fault tolerance, while many silent data corruptions (SDCs) may occur under a high fault rate due to the incomplete fault coverage. This paper proposes a system level approach to additionally cover SDCs in a partial redundancy by a light-weighted error prediction. Our results from a simulation under a stress radiation test condition show that with an average 8% cost in energy consumption, we can reduce the SDC rate from 12% to 0.37%, for our studied work loads.