Application-Aware diagnosis of runtime hardware faults

13 years 2 months ago

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Extreme technology scaling in silicon devices drastically affects reliability, particularly because of runtime failures induced by transistor wearout. Currently available online testing mechanisms focus on testing all components in the microprocessor, including hardware modules that have not been exercised, and thus have high performance penalties. We propose a hybrid hardware/software online testing solution where components that are heavily utilized by the software application are tested more thoroughly and frequently. Thus, our online testing approach focuses on the processor units that most affect application correctness, and it achieves high coverage while incurring minimal performance overhead. We also introduce a new metric, Application-Aware Fault Coverage, representing test's capability to detect faults that might have corrupted the state or the output of an application. Test coverage is further improved through the insertion of observation points that augment the covera...

Andrea Pellegrini, Valeria Bertacco

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