CIVA: Custom instruction vulnerability analysis framework

Abstract

This paper describes a methodology for analyzing the vulnerability of custom instructions against the electronic faults, considering different operations and the custom instruction graph topology. Our approach enables designers to optionally constrain the operand types and also the custom functional unit structure to reach an acceptable vulnerability. We have developed a framework to evaluate the desired goal. The presented framework explores the effects of different operations and their dependencies on overall vulnerability of the custom functional units. Our experiments show that, in most cases, custom functional units with similar speed-ups in performance present different vulnerability to soft errors.