Timing Analysis of Erroneous Systems

Erroneous systems allow timing errors to occur during ex-ecution, but use measures to ensure continued operation through changes in operating parameters (voltage and fre-quency), error correction at various levels of the system, or ensuring controlled occurrence of errors to perform approxi-mate computing. In this paper, we are interested in charac-terization of error behavior at the level of instructions and programs. We propose Inter- and Intra-Program Variation as measures of error rate variability in different programs and among instructions of a program, respectively. We also characterize the error rate variation caused by the program input data and show that it is comparable to other sources of variability such as process variation. Finally, we present an analysis of the physical location of errors in hardware