Vulnerability-aware Dynamic Reconfiguration of Partially Protected Caches

Cache vulnerability is a serious design concern due to exponential increase in soft errors with technology scaling. Partially Protected Caches (PPC) is a promising solution to mitigate vulnerability to soft errors in resource-constrained embedded systems. However, PPC suffers from both performance and energy overhead. Dynamic Cache Reconfiguration (DCR) is widely used in embedded systems to save energy and improve performance [13]. In this paper, we propose a methodology which takes advantage of the protected cache to reduce vulnerability, while utilizes reconfigurability to explore the trade-off between vulnerability, energy and performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly reduce both vulnerability (up to 87%) and energy consumption (up to 41%) without affecting the performance.