This work presents a solution for error detection in ARM microprocessors based on the use of the trace infrastructure. This approach uses the Program and Instrumentation Trace Macrocells that are part of ARM's CoreSight™ architecture to detect control-flow and data-flow errors, respectively. The proposed approach has been tested with low-energy protons. Experimental results demonstrate high accuracy with up to 95% of observed errors detected in a commercial microprocessor with no hardware modification. In addition, it is shown how the proposed approach can be useful for further analysis and diagnosis of the cause of errors.

A method is presented for automated improvement of embedded application reliability. The compilation process is guided using Genetic Algorithms and a Multi-Objective Optimization Approach (MOOGA). Even though modern compilers are not designed to generate reliable builds, they can be tuned to obtain compilations that improve their reliability, through simultaneous optimization of their fault coverage, execution time, and memory size. Experiments show that relevant reliability improvements can be obtained from efficient exploration of the compilation solutions space. Fault-injection simulation campaigns are performed to assess our proposal against different benchmarks and the results are assessed against a real ARM-based System on Chip under proton irradiation.

This work analyzes the suitability of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extensions of current microprocessors under radiation environments. SIMD extensions are intended for software acceleration, focusing mostly in applications that require high computational effort, which are common in many fields such as computer vision. SIMD extensions use a dedicated coprocessor that makes possible packing several instructions in one single extended instruction. Applications that require high performance could benefit from the use of SIMD coprocessors, but their reliability needs to be studied. In this work NEON™, the SIMD coprocessor of ARM microprocessors, has been selected as a case study to explore the behavior of SIMD extensions under radiation. Radiation experiments of ARM CORTEX™-A9 microprocessor have been accomplished with the objective of determining how the use of this kind of coprocessors can affect the system reliability.