Bit Impact Factor: Towards making fair vulnerability comparison

Reliability is becoming a major design concern in contemporary microprocessors since soft error rate is increasing due to technology scaling. Therefore, design time system vulnerability estimation is of paramount importance. Architectural Vulnerability Factor (AVF) is an early vulnerability estimation methodology. However, AVF considers that the value of a bit in a clock cycle is either required for Architecturally Correct Execution (i.e. ACE-bit) or not (i.e. unACE-bit); therefore, AVF cannot distinguish the vulnerability impact level of an ACE-bit. In this study, we present a new dimension which takes into account the vulnerability impact level of a bit. We introduce Bit Impact Factor metric which, we believe, will be helpful for extending AVF evaluation to provide a more accurate vulnerability analysis. © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.This work was partially supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under research Grants 112E004. The work is performed in the framework of COST ICT Action 1103 ‘‘Manufacturable and Dependable Multicore Architectures at Nanoscale’’.Peer Reviewe