Fault Tolerant Cache for Soft Error

In this paper, we propose a new cache structure for effective error correction of soft error. We added check bit and SEEB(soft error evaluation block) to evaluate the status of cache line. The SEEB stores result of parity check into the two-bit shit register and set the check bit to '1' when parity check fails twice in the same cache line. In this case the line where parity check fails twice is treated as a vulnerable to soft error. When the data is filled into the cache, the new replacement algorithm is suggested that it can only use the valid block determined by SEEB. This structure prohibits the vulnerable line from being used and contributes to efficient use of cache by the reuse of line where parity check fails only once can be reused. We tried to minimize the side effect of the proposed cache and the experimental results, using SPEC2000 benchmark, showed 3% degradation in hit rate, 15% timing overhead because of parity logic and 2.7% area overhead. But it can be considered as trivial for SEEB because almost tolerant design inevitably adopt this parity method even if there are some overhead. And if only parity logic is used then it can have $5%{\sim}10%$ advantage than ECC logic. By using this proposed cache, the system will be protected from the threat of soft error in cache and the hit rate can be maintained to the level without soft error in the cache.

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