Author(s)

Seyyed Amir Asghari, Atena Abdi, Hassan Taheri, Hossein Pedram, Saadat Pourmozaffari

Computer Engineering and Information Technology Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
Electrical Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.

This paper presents a new method for soft error detection using software redundancy (SEDSR) that is able to detect transient faults. Soft errors damage the control flow and data of programs and designers usually use hardware-based solutions to handle them. Software-based techniques for soft error detection force less cost and delay to systems and do not change their configuration. Therefore, these kinds of methods are appropriate alternatives for hardware-based techniques. SEDSR has two separate parts for data and control flow errors detection. Fault injection method is used to compare SEDSR with previous methods of this field based on the new parameter of “Evaluation Factor” that takes in account fault coverage, memory and performance overheads. These parameters are important in real time safety critical applications. Experimental results on SPEC2000 and some traditional benchmarks of this field show that SEDSR is much better than previous methods of this field. SEDSR’s evaluation factor is about 50% better than other methods of this field. These results show its success in satisfaction of the existing tradeoff between fault coverage, performance and memory overheads.

Soft Error Detection; Control Flow Errors; Data Errors; Evaluation Factor; Fault Injection

S. Amir Asghari, A. Abdi, H. Taheri, H. Pedram and S. Pourmozaffari, "SEDSR: Soft Error Detection Using Software Redundancy," Journal of Software Engineering and Applications, Vol. 5 No. 9, 2012, pp. 664-670. doi: 10.4236/jsea.2012.59078.