Sebastian Huhn, Stefan Frehse, Robert Wille, Rolf Drechsler,
"Determining Application-specific Knowledge for Improving Robustness of Sequential Circuits"
, in IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE, 2018, ISSN: 1063-8210
Original Titel:
Determining Application-specific Knowledge for Improving Robustness of Sequential Circuits
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
Due to their shrinking feature sizes as well as
environmental influences such as high-energy radiation, electrical
noise, particle strikes, etc., integrated circuits are getting more
vulnerable to transient faults. Accordingly, how to make those
circuits more robust has become an essential step in today?s design
flows. Methods increasing the robustness of circuits against these
faults already exist for a long period of time but either introduce
huge additional logic, change the timing behavior of the circuit,
or are applicable for dedicated circuits such as microprocessors
only.
In this work, we propose an alternative method which
overcomes these drawbacks by determining application-specific
knowledge of the circuit, namely the relations of Flip Flops and
when they assume the same value. By this, we exploit partial
redundancies, which are inherent in most circuits anyway (even
the optimized ones), to frequently compare circuit signals for
their correctness ? eventually leading to an increased robustness.
Since determining the correspondingly needed information is a
computationally hard task, formal methods such as Bounded
Model Checking, SAT-based Automatic Test Pattern Generation,
and Binary Decision Diagrams are utilized for this purpose.
The resulting methodology requires only a slight increase in
additional hardware, does only influence the timing behavior of
the circuit negligibly, and is automatically applicable to arbitrary
circuits. Experimental evaluations confirm these benefits.
Sprache der Kurzfassung:
Englisch
Journal:
IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Forschungs-