Reducing of soft error effects on a MIPS-based dual-core processor

In this paper, a simulation-based fault injection analysis of a MIPS-based dual-core processor is presented, an approach is proposed to improve the reliability of most vulnerable parts of the processor components and then the improvement is evaluated. In the first series of experiments, a total of 9100 transient faults were injected in 114 different fault sites of the processor. These experiments demonstrate that the Message Passing Interface, the Arbiter and the Program Counters are the most vulnerable parts of the processor. Thus, these parts were selected as targets for the improvement. The fault tolerance method used for improving the Arbiter is based on using the Triple Modular Redundancy. As for the Message Passing Interface and the Program Counters the single bit error correction Hamming code is used. The experimental results show 11.8% improvement in error recovery and 15.1% reduction of failure rate at the cost of 1.01% area overhead.