Comprehensive Failure Analysis against Soft Errors from Hardware and Software Perspectives

Abstract

With technology scaling, reliability against soft errors is becoming an important design concern for modern embedded systems. To avoid the high cost and performance overheads of full protection techniques, several researches have therefore turned their focus to selective protection techniques. This increases the need to accurately identify the most vulnerable components or instructions in a system. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of a system from both the hardware and software perspectives through intensive fault injection trials. From the hardware perspective, we find the most vulnerable hardware components by calculating component-wise failure rates. From the software perspective, we identify the most vulnerable instructions by using the novel root cause instruction analysis. With our results, we show that it is possible to reduce the failure rate of a system to only 12.40% with minimal protection.