OCEAN: An Optimized HW/SW Reliability Mitigation Approach for Scratchpad Memories in Real-Time SoCs

Recent process technology advances trigger reliability issues that degrade the Quality-of-Service (QoS) required by embedded Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). To maintain the required QoS with acceptable overheads, we propose OCEAN, a novel cross-layer error mitigation. OCEAN enforces on-chip SRAMs reliability with a fault-tolerant buffer. We utilize this buffer to protect a portion of the processed data used to restore from runtime error. We optimally select the buffer size to minimize the energy overhead, with timing and area constraints. OCEAN achieves full error mitigation with 10.1% average energy overhead compared to baseline operation that does not include any error correction capability, and 65% energy savings, compared to a cross-layer error mitigation mechanism.