CHAPTER 4

Advanced Architectural Vulnerability Analysis

4.1 Overview

Architectural vulnerability analysis is one of the key techniques to identify candidate hardware structures that need protection from soft errors. The higher is a bit’s Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF), the greater is its vulnerability to soft errors and hence the need to protect the bit. Besides identifying the most vulnerable structures, the AVF of every hardware structure on a chip is also necessary to compute the full-chip SDC and DUE FIT rates. Hence, a complete evaluation of AVFs of all hardware structures in a chip is critical.

Chapter 3 examined the basics of computing AVFs using ACE analysis. ACE analysis identifies the fraction of time a bit in a structure ...

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