Energy-efficient soft error-tolerant digital signal processing

In this paper, we present energy-efficient soft error-tolerant techniques for digital signal processing (DSP) systems. The proposed technique, referred to as algorithmic soft error-tolerance (ASET), employs low-complexity estimators of a main DSP block to achieve reliable operation in the presence of soft errors. Three distinct ASET techniques - spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal- are presented. For frequency selective finite-impulse response (FIR) filtering, it is shown that the proposed techniques provide robustness in the presence of soft error rates of up to P/sub er/=10/sup -2/ and P/sub er/=10/sup -3/ in a single-event upset scenario. The power dissipation of the proposed techniques ranges from 1.1 X to 1.7 X (spatial ASET) and 1.05 X to 1.17 X (spatio-temporal and temporal ASET) when the desired signal-to-noise ratio SNR/sub des/=25 dB. In comparison, the power dissipation of the commonly employed triple modular redundancy technique is 2.9 X.