The appearance of nanometer technologies has produced a significant increase of integrated circuit sensitivity to radiation, making the occurrence of soft errors much more frequent, not only in applications working in harsh environments, like aerospace circuits, but also for applications working at the earth surface. Therefore, hardened circuits are currently demanded in many applications where fault tolerance was not a concern in the very near past. To this purpose, efficient hardness evaluation solutions are required to deal with the increasing size and complexity of modern VLSI circuits. In this paper, a very fast and cost effective solution for SEU sensitivity evaluation is presented. The proposed approach uses FPGA emulation in an autonomous manner to fully exploit the FPGA emulation speed. Three different techniques to implement it are proposed and analyzed. Experimental results show that the proposed Autonomous Emulation approach can reach execution rates higher than one million faults per second, providing a performance improvement of two orders of magnitude with respect to previous approaches. These rates give way to consider very large fault injection campaigns that were not possible in the past.

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Hybrid error-detection techniques combine software techniques with an external hardware module that monitors the execution of a microprocessor. The external hardware module typically observes the control flow at the input or at the output of the microprocessor and compares it with the expected one. This paper proposes a new hybrid technique that monitors the control flow at both points and compares them to detect possible errors. The proposed approach does not require any software modification to detect control-flow errors. Fault injection campaigns have been performed on a LEON3 microprocessor. The results show full control-flow error detection with no performance degradation and a small area overhead. A complete solution can be obtained by complementing the proposed approach with software fault-tolerance techniques for data errors.

Emotion recognition is benefitting from the latest research into physiological monitoring and wireless communications, among other remarkable achievements. These technologies can indeed provide solutions to protect vulnerable people in scenarios such as personal assaults, the abuse of children or the elderly, gender violence or sexual aggression. Cyberphysical systems using smart sensors, artificial intelligence and wearable and inconspicuous devices can serve as bodyguards to detect these risky situations (through fear-related emotion detection) and automatically trigger a protection protocol. As expected, these systems should be trained and customized for each user to ensure the best possible performance, which undoubtedly requires a gender perspective. This paper presents a specialized fear recognition system for women based on a reduced set of physiological signals. The architecture proposed is characterized by the usage of three physiological sensors, lightweight binary classification and the conjunction of linear (temporal and frequency) and non-linear features. Moreover, a binary fear mapping strategy between dimensional and discrete emotional information based on emotional self-report data is implemented to avoid emotional bias. The architecture is evaluated using a public multi-modal physiological dataset with two approaches (subject-dependent and subject-independent models) focusing on the female participants. As a result, the proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art in fear recognition, achieving a recognition rate of up to 96.33% for the subject-dependent model.