Parity Waterfall method

Abstract

This paper proposes a method for improvement of the fault-coverage capabilities of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) designs. It utilizes Concurrent Error Detection (CED) techniques and the basic architectures of actual modern FPGAs the Look-Up Table (LUT) with two outputs. Proposed Parity Waterfall method is based on a cascade (waterfall) of several waves of inner parity generating the final parity of outputs of the whole circuit. The utilization of the (mostly) unused output of a two-output LUT allows the proposed method to cover any single possible routing or LUT fault with a small area overhead. The method is experimentally evaluated using the standard set of IWLS2005 benchmarks and using our simulator/emulator. The experimental results of the proposed parity waterfall method are compared with a similar existing technique (duplication with comparison). These results show that the area overhead is smaller than the overhead of the duplication with comparison method for all of the tested circuits and 100% fault coverage is achieved.