A Dynamic Continuous Signature Monitoring Technique for Reliable Microprocessors

Makoto SUGIHARA  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E94-C    No.4    pp.477-486
Publication Date: 2011/04/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1587/transele.E94.C.477
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Circuits and Design Techniques for Advanced Large Scale Integration)
Category: 
Keyword: 
soft error,  NBTI,  SEU,  SET,  control signal error,  continuous signature monitoring,  reliability,  vulnerability,  microprocessor,  

Full Text: PDF>>
Buy this Article


Summary: 
Reliability issues such as a soft error and NBTI (negative bias temperature instability) have become a matter of concern as integrated circuits continue to shrink. It is getting more and more important to take reliability requirements into account even for consumer products. This paper presents a dynamic continuous signature monitoring (DCSM) technique for high reliable computer systems. The DCSM technique dynamically generates reference signatures as well as runtime ones during executing a program. The DCSM technique stores the generated signatures in a signature table, which is a small storage circuit in a microprocessor, unlike the conventional static continuous signature monitoring techniques and contributes to saving program or data memory space that stores the signatures. Our experiments showed that our DCSM technique protected 1.4-100.0% of executed instructions depending on the size of signature tables.