Serrano-Cases, Alejandro, Martínez-Álvarez, Antonio, Bastos, Rodrigo Possamai, Cuenca-Asensi, Sergio
Bare-Metal Redundant Multi-Threading on Multicore SoCs under Neutron Irradiation
IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science. 2023, 70(8): 1643-1651. https://doi.org/10.1109/TNS.2023.3247129
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10045/132363
DOI: 10.1109/TNS.2023.3247129
ISSN: 0018-9499 (Print)
Abstract: 
A software technique is presented to protect commercial multi-core microprocessors against radiation-induced soft errors. Important time overheads associated with conventional software redundancy techniques limit the feasibility of advanced critical electronic systems. In our approach, redundant bare-metal threads are used, so that critical computation is distributed over the different micro-processor cores. In doing so, software redundancy can be applied to Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) micro-processors without incurring high-performance penalties. The proposed technique was evaluated using a low-cost single board computer (Raspberry Pi 4) under neutron irradiation. The results showed that the Redundant Multi-Threading versions detected and recovered all the Silent Data Corruption (SDC) events, and only increased HANG sensitivity with respect to the unhardened original versions. In addition, higher Mean Work to Failure (MWTF) estimations are achieved with our bare-metal technique than with the state-of-the-art bare-metal software-based techniques that only implement temporal redundancy.
Keywords:COTS, Neutron Radiation, Triple Modular Redundancy, Redundant Multi-Threading, Single-Board-Computer, System on Chip
IEEE
info:eu-repo/semantics/article