ANMR: Aging-aware adaptive N-modular redundancy for homogeneous multicore embedded processors

Advances in semiconductor technology have made integration of multiple processing cores into one single die a promising trend towards increasing processing performance, lowering power consumption, and increasing reliability for embedded systems. Multicore processors, due to their intrinsic redundancies, are good choices for critical embedded systems for which the reliability is a crucial component. In this paper, an aging-aware adaptive fault tolerance method for DVFS-enabled multicore processors is presented. The analytical results show 3 to 6 order of magnitude increase in reliability of the system without addition of cores or redundant software. By using an aging-aware approach, the proposed method contributes to less than 0.05% negative shift of the maximum frequency of every core in the processor. Experimental results also show that the method has less than 7% energy overhead as compared to the original mode of operation.