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Hardware Error Detection Using AN-Codes

Ute Schiffel

Qucosa (Saxon State and University Library Dresden), 2010

32 citations

Abstract

Due to the continuously decreasing feature sizes and the increasing complexity of integrated circuits, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware is becoming less and less reliable. However, dedicated reliable hardware is expensive and usually slower than commodity hardware. Thus, economic pressure will most likely result in the usage of unreliable COTS hardware in safety-critical systems. The usage of unreliable, COTS hardware in safety-critical systems results in the need for software-implemented solutions for handling execution errors caused by this unreliable hardware. In this thesis, we provide techniques for detecting hardware errors that disturb the execution of a program. The detection provided facilitates handling of these errors, for example, by retry or graceful degradation. We realize the error detection by transforming unsafe programs that are not guaranteed to detect execution errors into safe programs that detect execution errors with a high probability. Therefore, we use arithmetic AN-, ANB-, ANBD-, and ANBDmem-codes. These codes detect errors that modify data during storage or transport and errors that disturb computations as well. Furthermore, the error detection provided is independent of the hardware used. We present the following novel encoding approaches: - Software Encoded Processing (SEP) that transforms an unsafe binary into a safe execution at runtime by applying an ANB-code, and - Compiler Encoded Processing (CEP) that applies encoding at compile…

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