Instruction-level reliability improvement for embedded systems

Date
2020-09
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
2020 IEEE International Conference on Design & Test of Integrated Micro & Nano-Systems (DTS)
Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
IEEE
Volume
Issue
Pages
Language
English
Type
Conference Paper
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract

With the increasing number of applications in embedded computing systems, it became indispensable for the system designers to consider multiple objectives including power, performance, and reliability. Among these, reliability is a bigger constraint for safety critical applications. For example, fault tolerance of transportation systems has become very critical with the use of many embedded on-board devices. There are many techniques proposed in the past decade to increase the fault tolerance of such systems. However, many of these techniques come with a significant overhead, which make them infeasible in most of the embedded execution scenarios. Motivated by this observation, our main contribution in this paper is to propose and evaluate an instruction criticality based reliable source code generation algorithm. Specifically, we propose an instruction ranking formula based on our detailed fault injection experiments. We use instruction rankings along with the overhead tolerance limits and generate a source code with increased fault tolerance. The primary goal behind this work is to improve reliability of an application while keeping the performance effects minimal. We apply state-of-the-art reliability techniques to evaluate our approach on a set of benchmarks. Our experimental results show that, the proposed approach achieves up to 8% decrease in error rates with only 10% performance overhead. The error rates further decrease with higher overhead tolerances.

Course
Other identifiers
Book Title
Keywords
Fault tolerance, Reliability, Instruction criticality, Embedded systems
Citation
Published Version (Please cite this version)