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Application-Based Analysis of Register File Criticality for Reliability Assessment in Embedded Microprocessors

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Abstract

There is an increasing concern to reduce the cost and overheads during the development of reliable systems. Selective protection of most critical parts of the systems represents a viable solution to obtain a high level of reliability at a fraction of the cost. In particular to design a selective fault mitigation strategy for processor-based systems, it is mandatory to identify and prioritize the most vulnerable registers in the register file as best candidates to be protected (hardened). This paper presents an application-based metric to estimate the criticality of each register from the microprocessor register file in microprocessor-based systems. The proposed metric relies on the combination of three different criteria based on common features of executed applications. The applicability and accuracy of our proposal have been evaluated in a set of applications running in different microprocessors. Results show a significant improvement in accuracy compared to previous approaches and regardless of the underlying architecture.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports with the project “Developing hybrid fault tolerance techniques for embedded microprocessors” (PHB2012-0158-PC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia

    Felipe Restrepo-Calle

  2. Computer Technology Department, University of Alicante, Carretera San Vicente del Raspeig s/n, 03690, Alicante, Spain

    Sergio Cuenca-Asensi & Antonio Martínez-Álvarez

  3. Instituto de Informática, PPGC and PGMICRO, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil

    Eduardo Chielle & Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt

Authors
  1. Felipe Restrepo-Calle
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  2. Sergio Cuenca-Asensi
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  3. Antonio Martínez-Álvarez
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  4. Eduardo Chielle
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  5. Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt
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Correspondence to Felipe Restrepo-Calle.

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Responsible Editor: L. M. Bolzani Pöhls

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Restrepo-Calle, F., Cuenca-Asensi, S., Martínez-Álvarez, A. et al. Application-Based Analysis of Register File Criticality for Reliability Assessment in Embedded Microprocessors. J Electron Test 31, 139–150 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-015-5513-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-015-5513-9

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