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A cache-assisted scratchpad memory for multiple-bit-error correction

Farbeh, H ; Sharif University of Technology | 2016

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  1. Type of Document: Article
  2. DOI: 10.1109/TVLSI.2016.2544811
  3. Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc , 2016
  4. Abstract:
  5. Scratchpad memory (SPM) is widely used in modern embedded processors to overcome the limitations of cache memory. The high vulnerability of SPM to soft errors, however, limits its usage in safety-critical applications. This paper proposes an efficient fault-tolerant scheme, called cache-assisted duplicated SPM (CADS), to protect SPM against soft errors. The main aim of CADS is to utilize cache memory to provide a replica for SPM lines. Using cache memory, CADS is able to guarantee a full duplication of all SPM lines. We also further enhance the proposed scheme by presenting buffered CADS (BCADS) that significantly improves the CADS energy efficiency. BCADS is compared with two well-known duplication schemes as well as single-error correction scheme. The comparison results reveal that: 1) BCADS imposes a 13.6% less energy-delay product (EDP) overhead than the duplication schemes and it does not require to modify the SPM manager and target application and 2) in comparison with the conventional single-error correction double-error detection (SEC-DED) scheme, BCADS provides a significantly higher error correction capability by correcting up to 4-b burst errors using a low-cost 4-b interleaved parity code. Moreover, the area overhead for error correction and the performance overhead of BCADS are negligible (less than 1%), whereas the area and performance overheads are 21.9% and 6.1% for SEC-DED, respectively. Furthermore, BCADS imposes about a 10.7% lower EDP overhead compared with the SEC-DED scheme
  6. Keywords:
  7. Data duplication ; Multiple-bit upset ; Scratchpad memory (SPM) ; Soft error correction ; Energy efficiency ; Error correction ; Error detection ; Errors ; Memory architecture ; Radiation hardening ; Bit error corrections ; Embedded processors ; Energy delay product ; Error correction capability ; Fault tolerant schemes ; Safety critical applications ; Single error corrections ; Target application ; Cache memory
  8. Source: IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems ; Volume 24, Issue 11 , 2016 , Pages 3296-3309 ; 10638210 (ISSN)
  9. URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7451282