Exploiting Existing Copies in Register File for Soft Error Correction

Abstract

Soft errors are an increasingly important problem in contemporary digital systems. Being the major data holding component in contemporary microprocessors, the register file has been an important part of the processor on which researchers offered many different schemes to protect against soft errors. In this paper we build on the previously proposed schemes and start with the observation that many register values already have a replica inside the storage space. We use this already available redundancy inside the register file in combination with a previously proposed value replication scheme for soft error detection and correction. We show that, by employing schemes that make use of the already available copies of the values inside the register file, it is possible to detect and correct 39.0 percent of the errors with an additional power consumption of 18.9 percent.