AN EFFECTIVE CONTROL FLOW CHECKING METHOD FOR MULTITASK PROCESSING IN HARSH ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Electronic equipment used in harsh environments such as space has to cope with many threats. One major threat is the intensive radiation which gives rise to Single Event Upsets (SEU) that lead to control flow errors and data errors. In the design of embedded systems to be used in space, the use of radiation tolerant equipment may therefore be a necessity. However, even if the higher cost of such a choice is not a problem, the efficiency of such equipment is lower than the COTS equipment. Therefore, the use of COTS with appropriate measures to handle the threats may be the optimal solution, in which a simultaneous optimization is carried out for power, performance, reliability and cost. In this paper, a novel method is presented for control flow error detection in multitask environments with less memory and performance overheads as compared to other methods seen in the literature.