Error Detection by Diverse Instructions and Loop Optimization in DSP

Abstract

For the digital signal processors (DSP), a new approach of detecting soft errors is proposed to overcome the transient fault, named EDIO. The goal of EDIO is to enhance the reliability of a DSP software system with reduced performance overhead, compared to former software fault tolerant techniques. EDIO employs diverse instructions for the sake of furthest exploring errors and increasing performance. The loop optimization delays the fault tolerance latency between errors detecting and errors handling, only in this way can EDIO schedule the software pipeline to reduce performance overhead significantly. We evaluate EDIO by the performance experiments and the ion irradiation experiments, which demonstrate exceptional fault coverage with a reasonable performance cost. Compared to the well-known software approach, EDIO demonstrates 6.4 times average speedup while remaining the ability to detect faults.