Non-intrusive reconfigurable HW/SW fault tolerance approach to detect transient faults in microprocessor systems

This paper presents a non-intrusive hybrid fault detection approach that combines hardware and software techniques to detect transient faults in microprocessors. Such faults have a major influence in microprocessor systems, affecting both data and control flow. In order to protect the system, an application-oriented hardware module is automatically generated and reconfigured on the system during runtime. When combined with fault tolerance techniques based on software, this solution offers full system protection against transient faults. A fault injection campaign is performed using a MIPS microprocessor executing a set of applications. HW/SW implementation in a reprogrammable platform shows minimal memory area and execution time overhead. Fault injection results show the efficiency of this method on detecting 100% of faults.