<title>Fault-tolerant adaptive FIR filters using variable detection threshold</title>

Abstract

Adaptive filters are widely used in many digital signal processing applications, where tap weight of the filters are adjusted by stochastic gradient search methods. Block adaptive filtering techniques, such as block least mean square and block conjugate gradient algorithm, were developed to speed up the convergence as well as improve the tracking capability which are two important factors in designing real-time adaptive filter systems. Even though algorithm-based fault tolerance can be used as a low-cost high level fault-tolerant technique to protect the aforementioned systems from hardware failures with minimal hardware overhead, the issue of choosing a good detection threshold remains a challenging problem. First of all, the systems usually only have limited computational resources, i.e., concurrent error detection and correction is not feasible. Secondly, any prior knowledge of input data is very difficult to get in practical settings. We propose a checksum-based fault detection scheme using two-level variable detection thresholds that is dynamically dependent on the past syndromes. Simulations show that the proposed scheme reduces the possibility of false alarms and has a high degree of fault coverage in adaptive filter systems.