A Memory Reliability Enhancement Technique for Multi Bit Upsets

Abstract

Technological advances allow the production of increasingly complex electronic systems. Nevertheless, technology and voltage scaling increased dramatically the susceptibility of new devices not only to Single Bit Upsets (SBU), but also to Multiple Bit Upsets (MBU). In safety critical applications, it is mandatory to provide fault-tolerant systems, providing high reliability while meeting applications requirements. The problem of reliability is particularly expressed within the memory which represents more than 80 % of systems on chips. To tackle this problem we propose a new memory reliability techniques referred to as DPSR: Double Parity Single Redundancy. DPSR is designed to enhance computing systems resilience to SBU and MBU. Based on a thorough fault injection experiments, DPSR shows promising results; It detects and corrects more than 99.6 % of encountered MBU and has an average time overhead of less than 3 %.