Software-based method for 'Soft Error' correction in space computers

Computer systems operating in space environment are subject to different radiation phenomena, whose effects are often called Soft Error. Generally, the radiation-hardened chips are used to break through these errors, but their costs are expensive and their performances are always lower than their counterparts. In this paper, a software-based approach for soft error correction is put forward. The technique is based on the coding and decoding of variables in programs to detect and correct the errors in them. By applying the proposed technique, several benchmark applications have been hardened against transient errors. Fault injection campaigns have been performed to evaluate the fault detection and correction capability of the proposed technique in comparison with state-of-the-art alternative methods. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is far more effective than the other considered techniques in terms of fault correction capability, at the cost of a limited increase in memory requirements and in performance overhead.