Patent attributes
Unavoidable physical phenomena, such as an alpha particle strikes, can cause soft errors in integrated circuits. Materials that emit alpha particles are ubiquitous, and higher energy cosmic particles penetrate the atmosphere and also cause soft errors. Some soft errors have no consequence, but others can cause an integrated circuit to malfunction. In some applications (e.g. driverless cars), proper operation of integrated circuits is critical to human life and safety. To minimize or eliminate the likelihood of a soft error becoming a serious malfunction, detailed assessment of individual potential soft errors and subsequent processor behavior is necessary. Embodiments of the present disclosure facilitate emulating a plurality of different, specific soft errors. Resilience may be assessed over the plurality of soft errors and application code may be advantageously engineered to improve resilience. Normal processor execution is halted to inject a given state error through a scan chain, and execution is subsequently resumed.
