Dynamic code duplication with vulnerability awareness for soft error detection on VLIW architectures

Soft errors are becoming a critical concern in embedded system designs. Code duplication techniques have been proposed to increase the reliability in multi-issue embedded systems such as VLIW by exploiting empty slots for duplicated instructions. However, they increase code size, another important concern, and ignore vulnerability differences in instructions, causing unnecessary or inefficient protection when selecting instructions to be duplicated under constraints. In this article, we propose a compiler-assisted dynamic code duplication method to minimize the code size overhead, and present vulnerability-aware duplication algorithms to maximize the effectiveness of instruction duplication with least overheads for VLIW architecture. Our experimental results with SoarGen and Synopsys simulation environments demonstrate that our proposals can reduce the code size by up to 40% and detect more soft errors by up to 82% via fault injection experiments over benchmarks from DSPstone and Livermore Loops as compared to the previously proposed instruction duplication technique.