Reliability Analysis of Embedded Applications in Non-Uniform Fault Tolerant Processors

Abstract

Soft error analysis has been greatly aided by the concept of Architectural vulnerability Factor (AVF) and Architecturally Correct Execution (ACE). The AVF of a processor is defined as the probability that a bit flip in the processor architecture will result in a visible error in the final output of a program. In this work, we exploit the techniques of AVF analysis to introduce a software-level vulnerability analysis. This metric allows insight into the vulnerability of instruction and software to hardware faults with a micro-architectural involved fault injection method. The proposed metric can be used to make judgments about the reliability of different programs on different processors with regard to architectural and compiler guidelines for improving the processor reliability.