Improving transient memory fault resilience of an H.264 decoder

Andreas Heinig, Michael Engel, Florian Schmoll, Peter Marwedel
2010 2010 8th IEEE Workshop on Embedded Systems for Real-Time Multimedia  
Traditionally, fault-tolerance has been the domain of expensive, hard real-time critical systems. However, the rates of transient faults occurring in semiconductor devices will increase significantly due to shrinking structure sizes and reduced operating voltages. Thus, even consumer-grade embedded applications with soft real-time requirements, like audio and video players, will require error detection and correction methods to ensure reliable everyday operation. Cost, timing and energy
more » ... ations, however, prevent the embedded system developer from correcting every single error. In many situations, however, it will not be required to create a totally error-free system. In such a system, only perceptible errors will have to be corrected. To distinguish between perceptible and non-perceptible errors, a classification of errors according to their relevance to the application is required. When real-time conditions have to be observed, the current timing properties of the system will provide additional contextual information. In this paper, we present a structure for an error-correcting embedded system based on a real-time aware classification. Using a cross-layer approach utilizing application annotations of error classifications as well as information available inside the operating system, the error correction overhead can be significantly reduced. This is shown in a first evaluation by analyzing the achievable improvements in an H.264 video decoder under error injection and simulated error correction.
doi:10.1109/estmed.2010.5666989 dblp:conf/estimedia/HeinigESM10 fatcat:h2vd2qhpkzhdlaywf5s46wk3ve