Program-Invariant Checking for Soft-Error Detection using Reconfigurable Hardware

There is an increasing concern about transient errors in deep submicron processor architectures. Software-only error detection approaches that exploit program invariants for silent error detection incur large execution overheads and are unreliable as state can be corrupted after invariant checkpoints. In this article, we explore the use of configurable hardware structures for the continuous evaluation of high-level program invariants at the assembly level. We evaluate the resource requirements and performance of the proposed predicate-evaluation hardware structures when integrated with a 32-bit MIPS soft core on a contemporary reconfigurable hardware device. The results, for a small set of kernel codes, reveal that these hardware structures require a very small number of hardware resources with negligible impact on the processor core that they are integrated in. Moreover, the amount of resources is fairly insensitive to the complexity of the invariants, thus making the proposed structures an attractive alternative to software-only predicate checking.