An Effective Control Flow Checking Method for Multitask Processing in Harsh Environments

Abstract

Electronic equipment used in harsh environments such as space has to cope with many threats. One major threat is the intensive radiation which gives rise to Single Event Upsets (SEU) that lead to control flow errors and data errors. In the design of embedded systems to be used in space, the use of radiation tolerant equipment may therefore be a necessity. However, even if the higher cost of such a choice is not a problem, the efficiency of such equipment is lower than the COTS equipment. Therefore, the use of COTS with appropriate measures to handle the threats may be the optimal solution, in which a simultaneous optimization is carried out for power, performance, reliability and cost. In this paper, a novel method is presented for control flow error detection in multitask environments with less memory and performance overheads as compared to other methods seen in the literature.

An Investigation into Soft Error Detection Efficiency at Operating System Level

“…The CFCME (Control Checking Method for Multitask Environment) [ 12 ] method is the improved version of the SCFC for multitask processing environment. The overall structure of the operation and the instructions of the CFCME method is the same as those in SCFC method.…”

“…Embedded system designers have two options for selecting electronic equipment that will operate in harsh environments such as space [ 1 – 12 ]: (i) High Reliability (Radiation Tolerant or Radiation Hardened) equipment and (ii) Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) equipment. High Reliability equipment has high reliability value but is costly and its performance in comparison with COTS equipment is low.…”

“…However, COTS equipment carries considerable reliability concerns, as they are vulnerable against radiation that is the most important threat in space environment. Therefore, the reliability of COTS equipment should be increased with hardware and software reliability enhancement methods [ 11 , 12 ].…”

“…The authors have previously published some papers on soft error management, all of which, like all the other software methods, have been applied in application level. In this paper, three significant methods previously developed by the authors, namely, Software-based Control Flow Checking (SCFC) [ 11 ], Control Checking Method for Multitask Environment (CFCME) [ 12 ], and Critical Path Duplication (CPD) [ 16 ] are used on operating system level and their performance is evaluated.…”