Mitigating soft error risks through protecting critical variables and blocks

Smaller feature size, higher clock frequency and lower power consumption are of core concerns of today's nano-technology, which has been resulted by continuous downscaling of CMOS technologies. The resultant 'device shrinking' reduces the soft error tolerance of the VLSI circuits, as very little energy is needed to change their states. Safety critical systems are very sensitive to soft errors. A bit flip due to soft error can change the value of critical variable and consequently the system control flow can completely be changed which leads to system failure. To minimize soft error risks, a novel methodology is proposed to detect and recover from soft errors considering only 'critical code blocks' and 'critical variables' rather than considering all variables and/or blocks in the whole program. The proposed method shortens space and time overhead in comparison to existing dominant approaches.