Fault-tolerant Radar Signal Processing using Selective Observation Windows and Peak Detection

Abstract

Soft errors, such as bit flips, pose a serious threat to the functional safety of systems. Thus, ensuring the correct operation even in case of errors is particularly relevant for safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present a novel error detection and mitigation method for parallel FFTs in radar signal processing. We systematically define small observation windows in the 2D spectrum to detect peaks caused by soft errors. This enables protecting FFTs with several orders of magnitude lower computational overhead compared to related work. We conduct fault injection experiments to validate our method. Our experiments show that targets can be reliably detected even at higher error rates where more than 500 bit flips are present.