ECS an Endeavor Towards Providing Similar Cache Reliability Behavior in Different Programs

The reliability of embedded processors is one of the major concerns in safety-critical applications. Reliability is particularly expressed within the cache memories which are the largest part of new system on chips. Cache memories are the most vulnerable parts of the embedded systems and can affect the reliability drastically especially in deep transistor scaling. Therefore, evaluating the cache vulnerability is crucial in the design of a reliable system especially for safety-critical applications. It has been shown that using the same cache sizes for different programs leads to incompatible vulnerability patterns in them. According to the literature, most of the related researches, have exploited identical cache sizes for different programs in their reliability evaluations, while the cache reliability strictly depends on the cache size and program behavior. Traditional attempts for finding an appropriate cache size for different programs would need a huge design space exploration. In this work, we have introduced a criterion for determining the Effective Cache Size (ECS) for embedded processors which considers the inherent programs’ reliability and performance properties. According to the results, using the ECS for the representative benchmark applications, the reliability would be increased 43x on average with acceptable performance degradations (21% on average).