StitchUp: Automatic Control Flow Protection for High Level Synthesis Circuits

Soft-error detection in FPGAs typically requires replication, doubling the required area. We propose an approach which distinguishes between tolerable errors in data-flow, such-as arithmetic, and intolerable errors in control-flow, such as branches and their data-dependencies. This approach is demonstrated in a new high-level synthesis compiler pass called StitchUp, which precisely identifies the control critical parts of the design, then automatically replicates only that part. We applied StitchUp to the CHStone benchmark suite and performed exhaustive hardware fault injection in each case, finding that all control-flow errors were detected while only requiring 1% circuit area overhead in the best case.