Reliable system design using decision diagrams in presence of hard and soft errors

Hard and soft errors are inherently different in property and effect on the functionality of systems. Utilizing this fact, a new reliability model is developed, i.e., “lifetime reliability”, which considers both hard and soft errors occurring in information processing systems. Based on an introduction of System Decision Diagrams a couple of new data structures denoted as System Resource Decision Diagram and System Task Instance Decision Diagram, respectively, are proposed. The first data structure deals with the hard errors occurring in the system, whereas the second one represents the effects soft errors have on the system´s functionality. Together, these data structures help calculate the lifetime reliability of the system they are representing. Both the construction of this diagram pair and the memory-aware evaluation of the reliability based on it are detailed in an algorithmic way. The error model representation and the reliability quantification approach are aimed to be employed in a high-level design process to accelerate exploration of design space. The proposed method is illustrated for a number of benchmarks taken from published papers. The achieved results demonstrate that this novel approach is highly memory efficient and at the same time accurate as compared to previous known schemes.