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Soft Errors in Modern Electronic Systems pp 253–285Cite as

Software-Level Soft-Error Mitigation Techniques

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Part of the book series: Frontiers in Electronic Testing ((FRET,volume 41))

Abstract

Several application domains exist, where the effects of Soft Errors on processor-based systems cannot be faced by acting on the hardware (either by changing the technology, or the components, or the architecture, or whatever else). In these cases, an attractive solution lies in just modifying the software: the ability to detect and possibly correct errors is obtained by introducing redundancy in the code and in the data, without modifying the underlying hardware. This chapter provides an overview of the methods resorting to this technique, outlining their characteristics and summarizing their advantages and limitations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term alternate reflects sequential execution, which is a feature specific to the recovery block approach.

  2. 2.

    Task duplication [40] was introduced to detect transient faults, based on duplicating the computation of a task on two processors. If the results of the two executions do not match, the task is executed again in another processor until a pair of processors produces identical results. This scheme does not use checkpoints, and every time a fault is detected, the task has to be started from its beginning.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dip. di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129, Torino, Italy

    Maurizio Rebaudengo, Matteo Sonza Reorda & Massimo Violante

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  1. Maurizio Rebaudengo
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  2. Matteo Sonza Reorda
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  3. Massimo Violante
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Correspondence to Matteo Sonza Reorda .

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  1. Grenoble INP, CNRS, UJF, TIMA Laboratory, av. Felix Viallet 46, Grenoble CX, 38031, France

    Michael Nicolaidis

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Rebaudengo, M., Reorda, M.S., Violante, M. (2011). Software-Level Soft-Error Mitigation Techniques. In: Nicolaidis, M. (eds) Soft Errors in Modern Electronic Systems. Frontiers in Electronic Testing, vol 41. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6993-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6993-4_9

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