Software implemented transient fault detection in space computer

Computer systems operating in space environment are subject to different radiation phenomena, whose effects are often called “Soft Error”. Generally, these systems employ hardware techniques to address soft-errors, however, software techniques can provide a lower-cost and more flexible alternative. This paper presents a novel, software-only, transient-fault-detection technique, which is based on a new control flow checking scheme combined with software redundancy. The distinctive advantage of our approach over other fault tolerance techniques is the lower performance overhead with the higher fault coverage. It is able to cope with transient faults affecting data and the program control flow. By applying the proposed technique on several benchmark applications, we evaluate the error detection capabilities by means of several fault injection campaigns. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can detect more than 98% of the injected bit-flip faults with a mean execution time increase of 153%.