Reliability-Performance Analysis of Hardware and Software Co-Designs in SRAM-Based APSoCs

All programmable system-on-chip (APSoC) devices provide higher system performance and programmable flexibility at lower costs compared to standalone field-programmable gate array devices and processors. Unfortunately, it has been demonstrated that the high complexity and density of APSoCs increase the system's susceptibility to radiation-induced errors. This paper investigates the effects of soft errors on APSoCs at design level through reliability and performance analyses. We explore 28 different hardware and software co-designs varying the workload distribution between hardware and software. We also propose a reliability analysis flow based on fault injection (FI) to estimate the reliability trend of hardware-only and software-only designs and hardware-software co-designs. Results obtained from both radiation experiments and FI campaigns reveal that performance and reliability can be improved up to 117× by offloading the workload of an APSoC-based system to its programmable logic core. We also show that the proposed flow is a precise method to estimate the reliability trend of system designs on APSoCs before radiation experiments.