Instruction-Vulnerability-Factor-Based Reliability Analysis Model for Program Memory

Bit faults induced by single-event upsets in instruction may not cause a system to experience an error. The instruction vulnerability factor (IVF) is first defined to quantify the effect of non-effective upsets on program reliability in this paper; and the mean time to failure (MTTF) model of program memory is then derived based on IVF. Further analysis of MTTF model concludes that the MTTF of program memory using error correcting code (ECC) and scrubbing is not always better than unhardened program memory. The constraints that should be met upon utilizing ECC and scrubbing in program memory are presented for the first time, to the best of authors’ knowledge. Additionally, the proposed models and conclusions are validated by Monte Carlo simulations in MATLAB. These results show that the proposed models have a good accuracy and their margin of error is less than 3 % compared with MATLAB simulation results. It should be highlighted that our conclusions may be used to contribute to selecting the optimal fault-tolerant technique to harden the program memory.