Dynamic Lockstep Processors for Applications with Functional Safety Relevance

Dynamic Lockstep Processors for Applications with Functional Safety Relevance

연구 분야: Cryptography

학회: 2021 26th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA )

Lockstep processing is a recognized technique for helping to secure functional-safety relevant processing against, for instance, single upset errors that might cause faulty execution of code. Lockstepping processors does however bind processing resources in a fashion not beneficial to architectures and applications that would benefit from multi-core/-processors. We propose a novel on-demand synchronizing of cores/processors for lock-step operation featuring post-processing resource release, a concept that facilitates the implementation of modularly redundant core/processor arrays. We discuss the fundamentals of the design and some implementation notes on work achieved to date.