Area-Efficient Fault Tolerant Design for Finite State Machines

Abstract

The finite state machine (FSM) controls the operation of the entire system. Therefore, if the errors occur in the FSM, it causes serious problem of the system. The fault tolerant state machine is proposed to deal with the errors in the FSM. In this paper, we propose a selective fault-tolerant finite state machine that increases fault-tolerance by applying the fault-tolerant circuit selectively according to the importance of state. The proposed SFT-FSM is 39% smaller when the redundancy factor $\pmb{N}$ is 9, compared to the FSM with NMR technique.