Abstract
A high-level C++ hardening library is designed for the protection of critical software against the harmful effects of radiation environments that can damage systems. A mathematical and empirical model to predict system behavior in the presence of radiation induced faults is also presented. This model generates a quick evaluation and adjustment of several reliability vs. performance trade-offs, to optimize radiation hardening based on the proposed C++ hardening library. Several simulations and irradiation campaigns with protons and neutrons are used to build the model and to tune it. Finally, the effects of our hardening approach are compared with other hardened and non-hardened approaches.
Highlights
Progressive technological down-scaling is reducing the natural resilience of circuits, implying greater susceptibility to radiation faults [1]
In this article we focus on the Software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) techniques, because they can be implemented in commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microprocessors, thereby avoiding any internal modification to the microprocessor
For time-sampled systems, where the program starts every TS, executes over a certain time, TE, stops until the sample, we can compute the mean time to failure (MTTF), which is the average time between two failures: MTTF = TS · mean work to failure (MWTF), (8)
Summary
Progressive technological down-scaling is reducing the natural resilience of circuits, implying greater susceptibility to radiation faults [1]. Other recent approaches represent attempts to gain reliability improvements by introducing no modifications in either the application (code instrumentation) or in the system (specific components) These techniques seek to achieve improvements during the transformation from high level code (source code) to machine code (executable) by altering the code compilation method [10]. We propose a method that is intended for the protection of software code on COTS processors It addresses the following elements of a COTS microcontroller system: Numeric data stored in temporary and long-term storage locations. Any existing program can be hardened, by a mere redefinition of the variables used, while the active part of the code requires no single modification This idea per se is not novel, as TMR is widely used to achieve data protection, but the way it has been implemented and optimized with respect to radiation tolerance is new and easy to use
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