SEU Reliability Assessment Framework for COTS Many-core Processors

The high level of performance intrinsic to many-core architectures has made them the obvious successor to single-core processors in scenarios that require high computation. However, the increase in compute units also magnifies the vulnerability to soft errors, which may lead to system failure. This work proposes a portable and scalable fault injection engine for open-source many-core processor architectures. The tool performs automated simulation-based fault injection campaigns on the RTL design to provide insight into the impact of soft errors on each processor core and to evaluate their propagation across cores. This platform was validated on the OpenPiton open-source many-core processor, with a reliability assessment performed to evaluate SEU impact on the targeted architecture. This study was made on a 2-core and a 3-core system with 6 classes of faults, but the approach is scalable to more cores and can be easily extended to cover more fault injection targets. Our results show that 38.5% and 51.1% of the injected faults have led to an erroneous output result of the target core and 13.7% and 2.5% to a system crash for 2-core and 3-core systems, respectively.