Generic Design and Automatic Deployment of NMR Strategies on HW Cores

Abstract

Hardware fault tolerance is a requirement even for noncritical applications, since unexpected failures may damage the reputation of manufacturers and limit the acceptance of their products. However, current practices for the design and deployment of hardware redundancy techniques remain in practice specific (defined on a case-per-case basis) and mostly manual. This paper addresses the challenging problems of (i) engineering NMR strategies in a generic way, and (ii) automating their deployment. This approach relies on metaprogramming to specify NMR mechanisms and open compilers to automatically deploy such mechanisms on the selected hardware core. Fault injection complements that approach by providing the means to (i) determine the best core for replication, and (ii) check the effectiveness of the deployed NMR strategy. A PIC microcontroller is used as case study to exemplify the approach and show its feasibility.