Lockstep Dual-Core ARM A9: Implementation and Resilience Analysis under Heavy Ion-Induced Soft Errors

Abstract

© 1963-2012 IEEE.This paper presents a dual-core lockstep (DCLS) implementation to protect hard-core processors against radiation-induced soft errors. The proposed DCLS is applied to an Advanced RISC Machine Cortex-A9 embedded processor. Different software optimizations were evaluated to assess their impact on performance and fault tolerance. Heavy ions' experiments and fault injection emulation were performed to analyze the system susceptibility to errors and the DCLS performance. Results show that the approach is able to decrease the system cross section and achieve high protection against errors. The DCLS successfully protects the system from up to 78% of the injected faults. The execution performance analysis shows that by reducing the number of verifications and augmenting the block partition execution time, it is possible to increase the system reliability with minimal performance losses.