Silent Data Corruption and Embedded Processing With NASA's SpaceCube

Dramatic increases in embedded data processing performance are becoming possible using platforms such as the NASA SpaceCube. With a flexible architecture and commercial devices, selected computations can be tuned for the highest performance while giving up perfect data reliability. More needs to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE embedded systems letters Vol. 4; no. 2; pp. 33 - 36
Main Authors Zick, K. M., Chien-Chih Yu, Walters, J. P., French, M.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.06.2012
Subjects
Built-in self-test
Circuit faults
Detectors
Emulation
Field programmable gate arrays
Onboard processing
Performance evaluation
radiation hardening-by-software
radiation-induced upsets
Registers
silent data corruption (SDC)
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Summary:Dramatic increases in embedded data processing performance are becoming possible using platforms such as the NASA SpaceCube. With a flexible architecture and commercial devices, selected computations can be tuned for the highest performance while giving up perfect data reliability. More needs to be known about the nature of silent data corruption in this paradigm. When it occurs, how pervasive is it? To what extent can it be mitigated while near-optimal performance is maintained? This paper provides new insights into these questions, via a fault emulation-based study of two disparate applications running on a hard-core embedded processor. Two very low-cost methods of data error detection reduce the worst type of silent data corruption (SDC) by 89-97% with a performance overhead of <; 1%.
ISSN:1943-0663
1943-0671
DOI:10.1109/LES.2012.2192413