An integrated approach for increasing the soft-error detection capabilities in SoCs processors

Software implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) techniques are able to detect most of the transient and permanent faults during the usual system operations. However, these techniques are not capable to detect some transient faults affecting processor memory elements such as state registers inside the processor control unit, or temporary registers inside the arithmetic and logic unit. In this paper, we propose an integrated (hardware and software) approach to increase the fault detection capabilities of software techniques by introducing a limited hardware redundancy. Experimental results are reported showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach in covering soft-errors affecting the processor memory elements and escaping to purely software approaches.