Reliable address translation for instructions

As a result of technology scaling, spatial multi-bit soft errors have been becoming a big concern for SRAM-based storage structures, such as caches, buffers, and register files, in the design of reliable computer systems. Conventional techniques, such as bit interleaving or stronger coding, cannot provide the designers with effective solutions to the problem of reliable address generation in instruction translation lookaside buffers (iTLB) because of high power and/or latency overheads. In this study, we aim to generate reliable address translation for instructions without compromising either on performance or on power consumption. To do so, we propose to use a pair of identical registers storing the last address translation, which are referred to as context frame registers (CFR). As long as the control flow of programs stays in the same page, address translations are supplied by these two registers, instead of the iTLB. Since two CFRs keep the same address translation, spatial multi-bit errors are detected by comparing their contents. If their contents do not match, we obtain the address translation from the iTLB as usual, which uses strong coding for error detection and correction.