Vulnerability-Aware Energy Optimization for Reconfigurable Caches in Multitasking Systems.

Cache vulnerability due to soft errors is one of the reliability concerns in embedded systems. Dynamic reconfiguration techniques are widely studied for improving cache energy without considering the implications of cache vulnerability. Maintaining a useful data longer in the cache can be beneficial for energy improvement due to reduction in miss rates, however, longer data retention negatively impacts the vulnerability due to soft errors. This paper studies the tradeoff between energy efficiency improvement and reduction in cache vulnerability during cache reconfiguration. We propose a heuristic approach for both intertask and intratask cache reconfiguration in multitasking systems. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach can significantly improve both vulnerability (25% on average) and energy efficiency (21% on average) for data cache without violating real-time constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]