Implementation of Selective Fault Tolerance with conventional synthesis tools

Abstract

Circuits implementing the concept of Selective Fault Tolerance according to [1] are fault-tolerant for a specified subset of inputs. In this paper, a new heuristic is presented to make the method of Selective Fault Tolerance applicable to industrial designs. The heuristic can be efficiently implemented by use of conventional design tools. Compared to TMR, the method, in combination with the heuristic, saves a huge amount of area redundancy and fault tolerance is adapted to the real requirements of a system specification. This is demonstrated by experimental results obtained from circuit descriptions in Verilog and a synthesis with the tool Synopsys.