80 mu W/MHz, 850 MHz Fault Tolerant Processor with Fault Monitor Systems

Abstract

The processor is becoming increasingly susceptible to transient faults with fluctuating voltage, widening operating temperature, and increasing clock frequency. Especially, processor, operating near threshold voltage for a low power, can expose to transient faults with the thin margin of process, voltage, and temperature. This paper presents a fault tolerant processor having on-chip fault monitor systems for processor core and cache, which detects faults and corrects faults, and a fault injector which injects faults for testing. The fault tolerant feature is analyzed by a fault injection and quantitative analysis complying with ISO26262 standard. As a result, the proposed work achieves 80 mu W/MHz energy efficiency, 850 MHz maximum frequency, 72% fault trap reduction, and 99.23% single point fault failure rate complying with ISO26262.