Temporal properties of error handling for multimedia applications

In embedded consumer electronics devices, cost pressure is one of the driving design objectives. Devices that handle multimedia information, like DVD players or digital video cameras require high computing performance and realtime capabilities while adhering to the cost restrictions. The cost pressure often results in system designs that barely exceed the minimum requirements for such a system. Thus, hardware-based fault tolerance methods frequently are ignored due to their cost overhead. However, the amount of transient faults showing up in semiconductor-based systems is expected to increase sharply in the near future. Thus, low-overhead methods to correct related errors in such systems are required. Considering restrictions in processing speed, the real-time properties of a system with added error handling are of special interest. In this paper, we present our approach to flexible error handling and discuss the challenges as well as the inherent timing dependencies to deploy it in a typical soft realtime multimedia system, a H.264 video decoder.