A New Approach to Software-Implemented Fault Tolerance

A new approach for providing fault detection and correction capabilities by using software techniques only is described. The approach is suitable for developing safety-critical applications exploiting unhardened commercial-off-the-shelf processor-based architectures. Data and code duplications are exploited to detect and correct transient faults affecting the processor data segment, while control flow instruction duplication is used for detecting and correcting faults affecting the code segment. Results coming from extensive fault injection campaigns showed the effectiveness and the limitations of the method.