Variable Delayed Dual-Core Lockstep (VDCLS) Processor for Safety and Security Applications

Abstract

Dual-Core Lockstep (DCLS) is one of the most commonly used techniques in applications requiring functional safety. As the semiconductor process nodes keep shrinking, the DCLS technique is also more and more frequently seen in industrial or even consumer electronics. The paper presents the novel approach to the DCLS technique. While the typical approach is to set the slave core delay as a fixed number of clock cycles, we allow the checker core to run freely behind the main core within the constrained boundaries of clock cycles. This increases the temporal diversity needed for common mode failure mitigation. The system integrity provided by DCLS may also be used in the area of security applications. In this paper, we show that the proposed Variable Delayed Dual-Core Lockstep technique can flatten the power consumption correlation between the running cores, essential for a wide range of attacks. The proposed technique was implemented in the RISC-V processor core and verified in the Xilinx VCU108 FPGA platform.

Keywords

• dual-core lockstep
• functional safety
• security
• fault tolerance
• embedded processor
• RISC-V