Evaluation of the Suitability of NEON SIMD Microprocessor Extensions Under Proton Irradiation

This paper analyzes the suitability of single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) extensions of current microprocessors under radiation environments. SIMD extensions are intended for software acceleration, focusing mostly in applications that require high computational effort, which are common in many fields such as computer vision. SIMD extensions use a dedicated coprocessor that makes possible packing several instructions in one single extended instruction. Applications that require high performance could benefit from the use of SIMD coprocessors, but their reliability needs to be studied. In this paper, NEON, the SIMD coprocessor of ARM microprocessors, has been selected as a case study to explore the behavior of SIMD extensions under radiation. Radiation experiments of ARM CORTEX-A9 microprocessors have been accomplished with the objective of determining how the use of this kind of coprocessor can affect the system reliability.