Design of a soft-error robust microprocessor

The costs to protect a commercial microprocessor against soft errors are discussed in this work. Based on hardware and time redundancies, a protection scheme was designed at RT level to mitigate transient faults on combinational and memory circuits. A fault-tolerant IC version of a mass-produced 8-bit microprocessor is protected by the scheme. Design issues and results in area, performance and power are presented comparing the robust microprocessor with its non-protected version. The costs by flip-flop are also discussed permitting to estimate the overheads in area for any architecture. Furthermore, the RT-level protection scheme is compared with an electrical-level scheme based on a non-standard gate.