Time-constrained scheduling during high-level synthesis of fault-secure VLSI digital signal processors

Abstract

Advances in VLSI technology are making it feasible to pack millions of transistors on a single chip. A consequent increase in the number of on-chip faults as well as the growing importance of quality-metrics such as reliability and fault-tolerance are making on-chip fault-tolerance mandatory. On-chip realization of a computation is fault-secure if an observable error in the computation is detected. Components used in life-critical systems should be secured against all faults. While fault-security can be realized by duplicating the computation on disjoint hardware and voting on the result(s), such straightforward strategies entail appreciable hardware overhead. This paper presents computer-aided behavioral synthesis of fault-secure microarchitectures which require less than proportional increase in hardware. The strategy selects intermediate computations for additional voting. The resulting class of fault-secure microarchitectures supplants the enormous hardware requirements of naive fault-secure strategies with enhanced hardware utilization afforded by securing the intermediate computations. Experimental results show that fault-security can be implemented at a less than proportional increase in hardware overhead.