A Compact Model to Evaluate the Effects of High Level C++ Code Hardening in Radiation Environments

Abstract

A high-level C++ hardening library is designed for the protection of critical software against the harmful effects of radiation environments that can damage systems. A mathematical and empirical model to predict system behavior in the presence of radiation induced faults is also presented. This model generates a quick evaluation and adjustment of several reliability vs. performance trade-offs, to optimize radiation hardening based on the proposed C++ hardening library. Several simulations and irradiation campaigns with protons and neutrons are used to build the model and to tune it. Finally, the effects of our hardening approach are compared with other hardened and non-hardened approaches.

Radiation Tolerant Electronics

“…This was implemented on a zynq-7000 development board (Zybo) and it was shown that the proposed method could be used for a radiation tolerant synchronous buck converter design for applications requiring a relatively longer mission time, compared to the TMR and FMR techniques. In [13], a compact model was presented to evaluate the effects of high-level C++ code radiation hardening. The use of appropriate C++ classes facilitated the use of TMR.…”

Multi-Threaded Mitigation of Radiation-Induced Soft Errors in Bare-Metal Embedded Systems

“…To evaluate the hardening performance and estimate the inherent trade-offs between speed, memory footprint and fault coverage, a compact mathematical model presented in [26] has been used. This model evaluates the effects of high-level C++ code hardening.…”

“…Time-Size and MWTF metrics are showed in Table 2, where better applications are considered those with higher reliability and lower execution time (lower χ and higher MWTF). As in the cited paper [26], the proposed model was evaluated against real radiation measurements with protons and neutrons during two radiation campaigns described in it. As can be seen, the reference version presents a MWTF of 1.21 in protons and 0.35 in neutrons, which is only improved by TMR versions.…”

Empirical Mathematical Model of Microprocessor Sensitivity and Early Prediction to Proton and Neutron Radiation-Induced Soft Errors

“…• HData (H) [17] -Hardened Data: classes templates on C++ that replace the basic language types, in order to implement automated and transparent TMR protection. Benchmarks were coded using the following name convention: first the benchmark name, then the hardening technique applied, and finally the version number.…”

“…A preliminary work was presented in [17] that focused on optimizing the application of a High Level SIHFT technique to a reduced number of programs. This work extends that effort in two ways: 1) characterizing two platforms (ARM and MSP430) using the parameters obtained from the trained models; and, 2) analyzing and optimizing the application of three different SIHFT techniques to the benchmark suite: lowlevel implemented, high-level implemented and non-intrusive.…”