Software Mechanisms for Tolerating Soft Errors in an Automotive Brake-Controller

This paper describes the design and evaluation of two software implemented error detection and system recovery mechanisms that protect a prototype brakeby-wire controller from soft errors. We used an evaluation driven design process to develop the software mechanisms, which are specifically designed to prevent soft errors from causing critical failures in the brake controller. The design process involves 1) identifying vulnerable parts of the brake controller, 2) designing and verifying software mechanisms for error detection and recovery, and 3) performing an extensive evaluation of the proposed mechanisms. Results from error injection experiments in the last step show that our simple software mechanisms, combined with hardware exceptions for error detection, can effectively reduce the number of critical failures caused by soft errors in the brake controller.