Investigation of soft error mitigation techniques on resource-constrained IoT Edge systems.

Soft errors result from many effects, but the primary concern here is for those caused by radiation strikes from local sources, cosmic rays, or packaging materials contaminated with alpha emitters. The ultimate result of a soft error, regardless of its cause, is one (or more) bits flipped from their expected state. Traditional methods of detecting and correcting these occurrences include Triple Modular Redundancy (or Dual for detection only) either in software, executing the same code multiple times on the same processor and comparing the results, or in hardware, where multiple processors executed the code once and compare the result. TMR is costly, either in area, memory and power for hardware, or time, memory and power for software. Other techniques have similarly high costs. Embedded systems are often highly constrained in their resources and still subject to restrictive design requirements. Real-time systems, in particular, may not be able to afford a 3x increase in execution time to perform TMR, nor a similar increase in RAM. For remote systems, or those in inaccessible locations, a similar increase in power consumption may necessitate more frequent servicing or replacement if battery operated.