Dependability evaluation of transient fault effects in Reconfigurable Compute Fabric devices

Reconfigurable Compute Fabrics (RCFs) are cellular architectures in which an array of computing elements and a configurable interconnection fabric are combined with a general-purpose processor. These architectures are customizable to several classes of applications achieving high performance improvements and reduced engineering cost over traditional ASIC- or processor-only based solutions. Due to these characteristics, they can play an important role in safety- or mission-critical applications, provided that a clear understanding of their dependability is available. In this paper, we report an evaluation of the effects induced by transient faults within the resources of an RCF device. We considered the Motorola MRC6011 as case study, and we resorted to extensive fault injection to investigate the effects of transient faults.