Untestable faults identification in GPGPUs for safety-critical applications

Abstract

Nowadays, General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) devices are considered as promising solutions for high-performance safety-critical applications, such as those in the automotive field. However, their adoption requires solutions to effectively detect faults arising in the device during the operative life. Hence, effective in-field test solutions are required to guarantee high-reliability levels. In this paper, we leverage the results of Software-Based Self-Test (SBST) based approaches for GPGPUs by deploying new techniques for automating the identification of untestable faults (UF). Our methodology has achieved fault coverage of 82.8% when applied to an open-source implementation of the NVIDIA G80 GPU architecture. The proposed approach combining SBSTs and UFs identification appears as an effective solution for the reliability analysis of GPGPUs.