A software based approach to eliminate all SEU effects from mission critical programs

On space missions, software suffers from Single Event Upsets (SEUs), producing bit-flips. A single bitflip can impede the whole program. In this work we present a novel software based approach to tolerate SEUs by redundant execution and protected memory. This approach can protect specifically designed programs against all SEUs. Our aim is to be able to use of-the-shelf processors and other complex circuits by designing appropriately the software and simple hardened devices (e.g. memory). A Linux based simulator has been developed and implemented: it uses, validates and allowed us to refine our hypotheses. A hardware prototype confirmed these results.