Lockstep processing is a recognized technique for helping to secure functional-safety relevant processing against, for instance, single upset errors that might cause faulty execution of code. Lockstepping processors does however bind processing resources in a fashion not beneficial to architectures and applications that would benefit from multi-core/-processors. We propose a novel on-demand synchronizing of cores/processors for lock-step operation featuring post-processing resource release, a concept that facilitates the implementation of modularly redundant core/processor arrays. We discuss the fundamentals of the design and some implementation notes on work achieved to date.
@article{arxiv.2107.08997,
title = {Dynamic Lockstep Processors for Applications with Functional Safety Relevance},
author = {Hans Dermot Doran and Timo Lang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08997},
year = {2021}
}