Combined time and information redundancy for SEU-tolerance in energy-efficient real-time systems

• Published in: IEEE transactions on very large scale integration (VLSI) systems Vol. 14; no. 4; pp. 323 - 335
• Main Authors: Ejlali, A., Al-Hashimi, B.M., Schmitz, M.T., Rosinger, P., Miremadi, S.G.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway, NJ IEEE 01.04.2006; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Design. Technologies. Operation analysis. Testing; Dynamic voltage scaling; Dynamical systems; Dynamics; Electronics; Embedded systems; Energy consumption; Energy dissipation; Energy efficiency; Energy use; Exact sciences and technology; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; Information analysis; Integrated circuits; Real time; Real time systems; Redundancy; Semiconductor electronics. Microelectronics. Optoelectronics. Solid state devices; single event upsets; Studies; Tolerances; Very large scale integration; Voltage control; Single event upset; Voltage regulation; Dynamic conditions; Real time system; Low voltage; Fault tolerance; Embedded systems; single event upsets; Power consumption; Energy dissipation; Energetic efficiency; Integrated circuit; energy efficiency
• ISSN: 1063-8210; 1557-9999
• DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2006.874355

Recently, the tradeoff between energy consumption and fault-tolerance in real-time systems has been highlighted. These works have focused on dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) to reduce dynamic energy dissipation and on-time redundancy to achieve transient-fault tolerance. While the time redundancy technique exploits the available slack-time to increase the fault-tolerance by performing recovery executions, DVS exploits slack-time to save energy. Therefore, we believe there is a resource conflict between the time-redundancy technique and DVS. The first aim of this paper is to propose the use of information redundancy to solve this problem. We demonstrate through analytical and experimental studies that it is possible to achieve both higher transient fault-tolerance [tolerance to single event upsets (SEUs)] and less energy using a combination of information and time redundancy when compared with using time redundancy alone. The second aim of this paper is to analyze the interplay of transient-fault tolerance (SEU-tolerance) and adaptive body biasing (ABB) used to reduce static leakage energy, which has not been addressed in previous studies. We show that the same technique (i.e., the combination of time and information redundancy) is applicable to ABB-enabled systems and provides more advantages than time redundancy alone.