Determining the dependability of integrated systems with respect to soft errors is necessary for a growing number of applications. The most critical information must be identified to achieve good efficiency/cost trade-offs when selective hardening is necessary. In processor-based systems, the most critical variables and registers must thus be identified for the target application program. An improved algorithm for critical register identification is described and compared to previous work. Fault injection results in a system based on Leon2 are also reported. They demonstrate the impact of micro-architectural characteristics on evaluating the real criticality of the register file. New refinements are suggested for further work based on data dependency analysis.

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Assessing and improving the level of system robustness with respect to soft errors has become one of the main design challenges, especially when designing critical embedded systems. In systems using microprocessors (e.g. most of SoCs) the system dependability is strongly correlated with the variable lifetimes. In this paper, we discuss the impact of compilation optimizations on the lifetimes in both memory blocks and internal processor registers. Evaluations on many significant examples show that specific optimization options are required when the reliability is more important than execution time or code size.