Investigating the Inherent Soft Error Resilience of Embedded Applications by Full-System Simulation

It has long been acknowledged that some applications feature inherent resilience against soft errors, e.g., the impact of soft errors on multimedia applications is often non-visible to humans. In this paper we investigate the inherent resilience of two typical embedded applications using a case study of a control system and a robot arm. Both studies were enabled by our mixed-mode fault injection simulator ETISS-ML, which allows RTL-accurate fault injection while being able to simulate very long scenarios, e.g. robot movements of several seconds. Our results indicate that full simulation of the embedded system and its environment are required to classify whether the system can tolerate the impact of a soft error. This is due to the fact that it is hard to predict the impact of a certain output deviation without investigating the change in the system behavior taking into account the control loop. Based on this classification method we hope to be able to exploit this resilience for lowering the cost of error detection mechanisms in future research.