Dynamic Control Flow Checking Technique for Reliable Microprocessors

Reliability issues such as a soft error and NBTI (negative bias temperature instability) have become a matter of concern as integrated circuits continue to shrink. It is getting more and more important to take reliability requirements into account even for consumer products. This paper presents a dynamic control flow checking (DCFC) technique for high reliable computer systems. The DCFC technique dynamically generates reference signatures as well as runtime signatures during executing a program. The dynamic generation of reference and runtime signatures contributes to saving program or data memory space that stores the signatures. Our DCFC technique stores signatures in a signature table unlike the conventional static control flow checking techniques. Our experiments showed that our DCFC technique protected 1.4-100.0% of executed instructions depending on the size of signature tables.