Impact of compilation options on the criticality of registers in a microprocessor-based system

In microprocessor-based systems, evaluating the criticality of registers is required in order to achieve the expected dependability level with respect to soft errors and to guide selective improvements for a given application program. Methods have been proposed to perform such criticality evaluations at compile time. Several criteria can be used. We analyze in this paper the impact of compilation optimizations on the system dependability, taking into account the main criteria. We show that specific optimizations are required when dependability is more important than performance or size.