A SAFE approach towards early design space exploration of fault-tolerant multimedia MPSoCs

Abstract

With the reduction in feature size, transient errors start to play an important role in modern embedded systems. It is therefore important to make fault-tolerance a first-class citizen in embedded system design. Fault-tolerance patterns are techniques to make an application fault-tolerant. Not only do fault-tolerance patterns affect the quality of the embedded system (like performance, energy and cost), but there also are many ways of applying them. In this paper, we present the SAFE simulation framework that supports the early exploration of the different possibilities to apply fault-tolerance patterns to MPSoC-based embedded multimedia systems. The SAFE model incorporates fault injection, detection and correction. As a result, a Pareto front can be obtained that not only shows the trade-off between metrics like performance, energy, cost, but also captures reliability metrics like frame drops due to soft errors and the number of unresolvable faults.