Abstract:

Transient faults, which are caused by the radiation of cosmic rays, are always one of the top challenges for computing in space applications. With the continuous progress of integrated circuits, the performance of modern processors are improved significantly, but their dependability are increasingly affected by transient faults. Currently, the techniques for transient fault tolerance can mainly be classified into two types: hardwareimplemented and softwareimplemented. Comparing with the former techniques, the latter are attractive because of their advantages on costs and flexibility. This paper firstly sketches the basic principle of transient fault tolerance and the characteristics of softwareimplemented techniques. Then, the representative techniques of softwareimplemented fault tolerance are introduced and analyzed from different levels. Finally, the properties and defects of the current studies are summarized, and the advices are proposed for the future research trends of softwareimplemented fault tolerance.

Key words: transient fault;soft error;software fault tolerance;redundancy