Soft Error Protection in Safety Critical Embedded Applications: An Overview

The past decade, embedded systems are being used extensively. Although the power consumption has been decreased by lowering the supply voltage and size of the embedded system, consequentially these systems have become more susceptible to soft errors. This paper presents an overview of existing software implemented tolerance techniques that allow to protect the system against soft errors. Those techniques are then associated with the software requirements imposed by EN 50128, the software standard of the railway domain, and those imposed by IEC 60601-1, the general medical standard. It is shown that the detection techniques ease compliance for all both EN 50128 and IEC 60601-1.