Redundant Portable Multi-Threading for Soft Error Mitigation on Multicore Systems on Chip

This work presents a software technique to protect commercial multicore microprocessors against soft errors induced by ionizing radiation. Traditional software redundancy techniques introduce important time overheads, which limits feasibility in advanced critical electronic systems. In our approach, critical computation is spread over the different microprocessor cores by using redundant bare-metal threads. This way, software redundancy can be applied to COTS devices without involving high performance penalties. The proposed technique was evaluated in a low-cost single board computer (Raspberry Pi 4) under neutron irradiation. The results show that the multi-threaded technique can detect and correct single event faults without inquiring in performance overheads.