Low-Power Very-Large-Scale Integration Implementation of Fault-Tolerant Parallel Real Fast Fourier Transform Architectures Using Error Correction Codes and Algorithm-Based Fault-Tolerant Techniques

Abstract

As technology advances, electronic circuits are more vulnerable to errors. Soft errors are one among them that causes the degradation of a circuit’s reliability. In many applications, protecting critical modules is of main concern. One such module is Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Real FFT (RFFT) is a memory-based FFT architecture. RFFT architecture can be optimized by its processing element through employing several types of adder and multipliers and an optimized memory usage. It has been seen that various blocks operate simultaneously in many applications. For the protection of parallel FFTs using conventional Error Correction Codes (ECCs), algorithmic-based fault tolerance (ABFT) techniques like Parseval checks and its combination are seen. In this brief, the protection schemes are applied to the single RAM-based parallel RFFTs and dual RAM-based parallel RFFTs. This work is implemented on platforms such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) using Verilog HDL and on application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) using a cadence encounter digital IC implementation tool. The synthesis results, including LUTs, slices registers, LUT–Flip-Flop pairs, and the frequency of two types of protected parallel RFFTs, are analyzed, along with the existing FFTs. The two proposed architectures with the combined protection scheme Parity-SOS-ECC present an 88% and 33% reduction in area overhead when compared to the existing parallel RFFTs. The performance metrics like area, power, delay, and power delay product (PDP) in an ASIC of 45 nm and 90 nm technology are evaluated, and the proposed single RAM-based parallel RFFTs architecture presents a 62.93% and 57.56% improvement of PDP in 45 nm technology and a 67.20% and 60.31% improvement of PDP in 90 nm technology compared to the dual RAM-based parallel RFFTs and the existing architecture, respectively.