Program Control-Flow Structural Integrity Checking Based Soft Error Detection Method for DSP

Abstract

Nowadays, for the equipment in the outer space, the system safety and reliability are largely affected by soft errors which are caused by the single high energy particles. This is frequently reported in DSP and the other memory devices. Thus, the detection of soft error becomes an interesting research topic. For the purpose of detecting the occurrence of soft error occurred in storage areas of a DSP program, a control flow integrity based checking scheme for soft error detection is presented in this work. In this work, the DSP program implemented in assembly language is mainly focused. Firstly, the program is divided into a number of basic blocks with corresponding structure information being stored in a partition table. Then, for each basic block, a checkpoint is set at the end. The program control flow error can be easily determined by examining the consistency between the information at runtime and that recorded information in the partition table. Compared with the signature-based method, the proposed method is able to achieve almost 100% of error detection coverage. Furthermore, the proposed detection scheme has better cross platform portability under almost same detection efficiency and detection overhead.