Online Estimation of Architectural Vulnerability Factor for Soft Errors

As CMOS technology scales and more transistors are packed on to the same chip, soft error reliability has become an increasingly important design issue for processors. Prior research has shown that there is significant architecture-level masking, and many soft error solutions take advantage of this effect. Prior work has also shown that the degree of such masking can vary significantly across workloads and between individual workload phases, motivating dynamic adaptation of reliability solutions for optimal cost and benefit. For such adaptation, it is important to be able to accurately estimate the amount of masking or the architecture vulnerability factor (AVF) online, while the program is running. Unfortunately, existing solutions for estimating AVF are often based on offline simulators and hard to implement in real processors. This paper proposes a novel way of estimating AVF online, using simple modifications to the processor. The estimation method applies to both logic and s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ISCA
• Authors: Xiaodong Li, Sarita V. Adve, Pradip Bose, Jude A. Rivers
• Keywords: Hardware, ISCA 2008, Soft Error, Soft Error Reliability, Soft Error Solutions