A CAD framework for generating self-checking multipliers based on residue codes

Abstract

The basic drawbacks related to the design of self-checking circuits include high hardware cost and design effort. Recent developments on self-checking operators based on parity prediction compatible schemes allow us to achieve high fault coverage and low hardware cost in self-checking data paths for the majority of basic data path blocks such as, adders, ALUs, shifters, register files, etc. However, parity prediction self-checking multipliers involve hardware overhead significantly higher than for other blocks. Thus, large multipliers will increase significantly the hardware overhead of the whole data path. Residue arithmetic codes allow to reduce this cost The tools presented in this paper generate automatically self-checking multipliers using such codes. They complete our tools using parity prediction for various other blocks, and enable automatic generation of low cost self-checking data paths.