Transient errors resiliency analysis technique for automotive safety critical applications

Abstract

When a single bit is flipped as a result of a transient error in an electronic circuit, its effect can have a severe impact if the circuit is deployed in safety critical domains such as automotive, aeronautics, and industrial automation. In the design phase it is therefore essential to evaluate, and where necessary improve, the resilience of a circuit to all possible transient errors. In this paper, we present a method to analyze the transient error resiliency of a digital circuit. This method is based on an analytical model. It models a transient error as a random function and finds the vulnerable number of bits for each node. We perform a case study on a circuit implementation of a well-known adaptive filter algorithm. The results from the analytical and simulation models show that the analytical model is accurate enough to estimate the effects of transient errors on the performance of a digital circuit. Our analytical method also reduces the analysis time significantly in a design phase.