Design of a Self-Reconfigurable Adder for Fault-Tolerant VLSI Architecture

Abstract

Fault Tolerance is the ability of a system to detect and recover from a fault in the system. By incorporating fault tolerant features in any architecture, reliability and durability of the system increases at the cost of increased hardware. There must be a good tradeoff between cost and system performance. For all critical applications the system must reconfigure itself automatically to continue its normal operation even if any fault occurs. Again adder is the most essential block in any digital architecture. In this article we will design a four bit fault tolerant ripple carry adder and also discuss how design costs and number of faults to be tolerated are affected with the size of sub-module chosen to make the system self-reconfigurable.