CREA: A Checkpoint Based Reliable Micro-architecture for Superscalar Processors

Abstract

Conventional temporal redundant techniques to detect transient faults have resulted in considerable performance loss. One major reason for this problem is the reclamation of some critical resources, such as the instruction window and physical registers, is delayed, which degrades instruction-level parallelism. This paper proposes a novel fault-tolerant micro-architecture based on checkpoint mechanism. All occupied resources are reclaimed during the retirement stage in the first execution. Therefore, the performance overhead is mitigated evidently. Our scheme requires only small hardware cost and provides short fault detection latency.