On the Usefulness of Detecting Soft Errors in Parallel Pipelines for High-Speed Machine Vision Based on Organic Computing

Abstract:
Computer hardware is always in danger of being hit by ionized particles which cause different kinds of faults. In this paper, the effect of transient soft-errors on the stages of parallel pipelines is investigated by the example of emergent algorithms and machine vision. A fault injection model is introduced and the corresponding protection scheme is presented. During simulation, the number of relevant faults showed to be relatively small and the effect on the pipelines was mostly negligible. However, the costs for protection are low possibly making use of protection worthwhile.