Invited - Cross-layer approaches for soft error modeling and mitigation

Abstract

Radiation-induced soft errors are major reliability threat for VLSI systems fabricated using nanoscale technologies. While soft errors are generated due to device-level interactions, they could propagate at multiple levels and impair user-visible outputs. Hence, it is crucial to evaluate the impact of these errors using a combined knowledge of various layers in a cross-layer manner. Development of a fast and accurate soft error analysis requires a detailed information about underlying technology, functionality of the hardware implementation, the system micro-architecture and architecture, and also the running application characteristics. This paper justifies the importance of cross-layer soft error modeling and mitigation by showing how existing soft error modeling techniques at various abstraction levels could be coupled to form a fast and accurate cross-layer soft error modeling platform, and accordingly, how this platform can be exploited towards low-cost design for soft error reliability.