Fault-Tolerant Circuit Design Methodology

In the past, integrated circuit errors due to radiation phenomena were negligible, but with continuing technology scaling and low-power requirements, they became magnified to such a degree that they were able to alter the implemented behavior, causing a failure of the whole electronic circuit. In order to increase reliability, general mitigation techniques can be applied. However, those solutions come at a high cost, which, for some applications, is prohibitive but in such cases, custom-tailored ad-hoc techniques can improve the cost. They are difficult to design and their application is not straight-forward. This book develops a systematic workflow for designing ad-hoc techniques. For that, a set of circuits was studied using an inductive process, which led to the identification of common circuit traits. Based on this system knowledge, a novel design methodology has been developed for designing ad-hoc techniques that reduce cost without jeopardizing fault tolerance. For validation, several case studies of ad-hoc techniques have been assessed using the proposed design methodology, showing in each case a significant cost improvement and thereby confirming the proposal.

Autorentext

BSc '03, M.Sc '05, PhD '11, MBA '13; Adjunct Professor at Universidad Antonio de Nebrija in Madrid, Spain.His research area is reliability and radiation protection of digital signal processing circuits in radiation environments. Furthermore, he is author of several technical publications in journals and international conferences.