TERPS: the embedded reliable processing system

TERPS is a fault-tolerant computer design that significantly reduces the threat of electromagnetic interference (EMI), using hardware checkpoint/rollback-recovery. TERPS tolerates EMI by periodically checkpointing processor state into a special safe-storage device. The detection of EMI invokes rollback, which recovers processor state from a previously check-pointed state and resumes normal execution. Rollback results in loss of performance dictated by the EMI duration; TERPS ensures forward progress of the system provided EMI events are separated by some minimum time interval (e.g., at least 5.12/spl mu/s for our prototype processor running at 100MHz). The performance overhead of our mechanism is reasonable: 5-6% overhead when checkpointing every 128 processor cycles.

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