Evaluating and Mitigating Neutrons Effects on COTS EdgeAI Accelerators

EdgeAI is an emerging artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator technology, which is capable of delivering improved AI performance at both a lower cost and a lower power level. With the aim of implementation in large quantities and in safety-critical environments, it is imperative to understand how single-event effects (SEEs) affect the reliability of this new family of devices and to propose efficient hardening solutions. Through neutron beam experiments and fault-injection analysis of a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) EdgeAI device, we are able to identify the device's SEE failure-modes, separate the error rate contributions of the device's different resources, and characterize the device's SEE reliability. During this analysis, we discovered that the vast majority of single-bit flips have no appreciable effect on the output. After this analysis, we propose a hardening solution that implements triple-modular redundancy (TMR) in the device without changing its physical architecture. We experimentally validate this solution and show that we are able to correct 96% of the misclassifications (critical errors) with nearly zero overhead.