Experimental Evaluation of Three Concurrent Error Detection Mechanisms

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of the effectiveness of three hardware-based control flow checking mechanisms, using software-implemented fault injection (SWIFI) method. The fault detection technique uses reconfigurable of the shelf FPGAs to concurrently check the execution flow of the target program. The technique assigns signatures to the target program in the compile time and verifies the signatures using a FPGA as a watchdog processor to detect possible violation caused by the transient faults. A total of 3000 faults were injected in the experimental embedded system, which is based on an 8051 microcontroller, to measure the error detection coverage. The experimental results show that these mechanisms detect about 90% of transient errors, injected by software implemented method.