Collective pointing: protecting pointer values against soft errors on processors

Today's technology provides us with the capability of producing low-voltage, increased transistor density processors. However these advancements come with side effects as well, they make processors more susceptible to high energy particles. These susceptibilities turn into security issues and make the processors' vulnerability to errors when these processors' operating environment is changed to places like high altitude atmosphere or space due to increasing electromagnetic interference. Luckily, there are also technologies developed for safe-guarding against these sort of errors, such as error correction algorithms and shielding hardware. The errors occurring at places storing the register id number used for addressing other registers can cause fatal errors by making the processor use wrong data coming from the wrong register. In this thesis, we have designed a technique for making these places store the register indices in a safe-guarded way against these errors and finally we also have shown our findings. This thesis was supported by a TUBITAK project titled "Reliable Microprocessors Design" under grant number 112E004.