Online hardening of programs against SEUs and SETs

Abstract

Processor cores embedded in systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are often deployed in critical computations, and when affected by faults they may produce dramatic effects. When hardware hardening is not cost-effective, software implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) can be a solution to increase SoCs' dependability. However, SIHFT increases the time for running the hardened application, and the memory occupation. In this paper we propose a method that eliminates the memory overhead, using a new approach to instruction hardening and control flow checking during the execution of the application, without the need for introducing any change in its source code. The proposed method is also non-intrusive, since it does not require any modification in the main processor's architecture. The method is suitable for hardening SoCs against transient faults and also for detecting permanent faults