ARFT: An Approximative Redundant Technique for Fault Tolerance

International audienceThis paper presents a novel redundancy technique for software fault tolerance, named Approximative Redundant Fault Tolerance (ARFT). It uses approximate computing in order to provide the same error detection of a classic DWC method with less overhead. In this work ARFT was implemented to protect the ARM Cortex-A9 embedded into Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC. An extensive fault injection campaign was performed to evaluate the proposed technique. Results show that distinct applications with different approximation methods present a big variation in terms of execution time, memory footprint and error detection capability. Performance analysis shows that ARFT can reduce the overhead in some benchmarks cases up to 40%