SEU Vulnerability of Multiprocessor Systems and Task Scheduling for Heterogeneous Multiprocessor Systems

Utilizing a heterogeneous multiprocessor system has become a popular design paradigm to build an embedded system at a cheap cost within short development time. A reliability issue for embedded systems, which is vulnerability to single event upsets (SEUs), has become a matter of concern as technology proceeds. This paper presents robustness of heterogeneous multiprocessor systems to SEUs and proposes task scheduling for minimizing SEU vulnerability of them. This paper experimentally shows that increasing performance of a CPU core deteriorates its reliability. Based on the experimental observation, we propose task scheduling for reducing SEU vulnerability of a heterogeneous multiprocessor system. The experimental results demonstrate that our task scheduling technique can reduce much of SEU vulnerability under real-time constraints.