Characterizing the Impact of Soft Errors Affecting Floating-point ALUs using RTL-Ievel Fault Injection

Strategies to detect, correct, or mitigate the impact of soft errors rely on errors injection experiments. For efficient evaluation, these experiments typically inject errors in software by sampling errors from a candidate distribution. Most often, these strategies randomly select and flip one bit in the output of an instruction. While single-bit flips may constitute a meaningful model for errors affecting hardware, the appropriateness of this model for software-based errors has not been studied. In this paper, we examine the manifestation of errors in the output registers due to errors affecting candidate instructions executed by floating-point arithmetic logic units (ALUs). We inject single-bit flips into the register-transfer level descriptions of floating-point ALUs and analyze the differences between anticipated and observed outputs when executing floating-point addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. We choose the operands for these instructions randomly and from operands observed in five benchmarks. We observe a rich distribution of errors in the output and analyze their implications for software-based fault injection campaigns.