A new reliability evaluation method for embedded system

More frequent occurrence of soft error makes reliability evaluation become an important issue in the design of embedded system. This paper presents a new evaluation method of architectural vulnerability factor (AVF) which reflects the effects of soft error on the execution of program. This method evaluates AVF of storage units from three perspectives: instruction behavior, storage type and operation context on the storage units. Through classification of the ineffective instructions with which soft error will not affect the execution result of program, exploration of ineffective instructions could be performed. According to the storage type, ineffective bits which have no effect on the result of program are identified. With operation context, some cycles in which the occurrence of soft error has no effect on the result of program are identified. This method not only avoids the aimlessness of injection statistics of traditional method, but also provides an automatic analysis mechanism which extracts necessary information for evaluation. In the experiments, AVF evaluations for instruction queue in MIPS-like processor and ARM processor are made, thus to demonstrate the validity of this method.