Hardening application programs by the operating system on COTS processors: what protection to SED can be expected and at what performance cost

Abstract

This paper presents how an operating system can protect its users applications against SEU effects. The overhead is 250% for pure computation programs. The operating system protects short processing elements of at most a few hundreds of $\mu $ sec. These are short enough to assume that at most 1 SEU must be taken into account according to a statistical analysis of SEU occurrence. If the single SEU hypothesis is satisfied, all SEU caused errors are corrected. This was confirmed by extensive simulation tests.