Exploiting Existing Comparators for Fine-Grained Low-Cost Error Detection

Abstract

Fault tolerance has become a fundamental concern in computer design, in addition to performance and power. Although several error detection schemes have been proposed to discover a faulty core in the system, these proposals could waste the whole core, including many error-free structures in it after error detection. Moreover, many fault-tolerant designs require additional hardware for data replication or for comparing the replicated data. In this study, we provide a low-cost, fine-grained error detection scheme by exploiting already existing comparators and data replications in the several pipeline stages such as issue queue, rename logic, and translation lookaside buffer. We reduce the vulnerability of the source register tags in IQ by 60%, the vulnerability of instruction TLB by 64%, the vulnerability of data TLB by 45%, and the vulnerability of the register tags of rename logic by 20%.