DocumentCode :
2584304
Title :
Computing cache vulnerability to transient errors and its implication
Author :
Zhang, Wei
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale, IL, USA
fYear :
2005
fDate :
3-5 Oct. 2005
Firstpage :
427
Lastpage :
435
Abstract :
Transient errors caused by particle strikes have become a critical challenge for microprocessor design. Being the major consumer of on-chip real estate, cache memories are particularly susceptible to transient errors. However, not all cache soft errors can be propagated to the processor. For instance, soft errors can be corrected by write operations before they are read. In this paper, we define the cache vulnerability factor (CVF) to be the probability that a fault in the cache can be propagated to the processor or other memory hierarchy. We also propose an approach to compute the CVF based on the cache line access patterns. Building upon the CVF we evaluate the reliability for different cache memories. Our results show that 83.5% of soft errors from a write-through data cache can be masked without affecting other components. We also propose two early write-back strategies to improve the reliability (i.e., by reducing the CVF) of write-back data caches without compromising the high performance.
Keywords :
cache storage; error correction; fault diagnosis; fault tolerance; integrated circuit reliability; integrated circuit testing; microprocessor chips; cache fault propagation; cache line access patterns; cache memories; cache soft errors; cache vulnerability computing; cache vulnerability factor; memory hierarchy; microprocessor design; transient errors; write operations; write-back data caches; write-back strategies; write-through data cache; Bridge circuits; Cache memory; Costs; Error correction; Fault tolerant systems; Frequency; Low voltage; Microprocessors; Protection; Redundancy;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems, 2005. DFT 2005. 20th IEEE International Symposium on
ISSN :
1550-5774
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2464-8
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/DFTVS.2005.23
Filename :
1544542
Link To Document :
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