Soft Error Handling for Embedded Systems using Compiler-OS Interaction

Abstract

Advancing semiconductor technologies increasingly fail to provide expected gains in cost and energy reductions due to reaching the physical limits of Moore’s Law and Dennard scaling. Instead, shrinking semiconductor feature sizes increase a circuit’s susceptibility to soft errors. In order to ensure reliable operation, a significant hardware overhead would be required.The FEHLER project (Flexible Error Handling for Embedded Real-Time Systems) introduces error semantics into the software development process which provide a system with information about the criticality of a given data object to soft errors. Using this information, the overhead required for error correction can be reduced significantly for many applications, since only errors affecting critical data have to be corrected.In this chapter, the fundamental components of FEHLER that cooperate at design and runtime of an embedded system are presented. These include static compiler analyses and transformations as well as a fault-aware microkernel. Using examples of typical embedded applications, the efficiency of the approach is demonstrated, along with an extension towards approximate computing systems.