Bare-Metal Redundant Multi-Threading on Multicore SoCs Under Neutron Irradiation

A software technique is presented to protect commercial multi-core microprocessors against radiation-induced soft errors. Important time overheads associated with conventional software redundancy techniques limit the feasibility of advanced critical electronic systems. In our approach, redundant bare-metal threads are used, so that critical computation is distributed over the different micro-processor cores. In doing so, software redundancy can be applied to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) micro-processors without incurring high-performance penalties. The proposed technique was evaluated using a low-cost single board computer (SBC) [Raspberry Pi 4 (RPI4)] under neutron irradiation. The results showed that the redundant multi-threading (RMT) versions detected and recovered all the silent data corruption (SDC) events, and only increased HANG sensitivity with respect to the unhardened original versions. In addition, higher mean work-to-failure (MWTF) estimations are achieved with our bare-metal technique than with the state-of-the-art bare-metal software-based techniques that only implement temporal redundancy.