Software-Level Soft-Error Mitigation Techniques

Several application domains exist, where the effects of Soft Errors on processor-based systems cannot be faced by acting on the hardware (either by changing the technology, or the components, or the architecture, or whatever else). In these cases, an attractive solution lies in just modifying the software: the ability to detect and possibly correct errors is obtained by introducing redundancy in the code and in the data, without modifying the underlying hardware. This chapter provides an overview of the methods resorting to this technique, outlining their characteristics and summarizing their advantages and limitations.