Evaluation and synthesis of self-monitoring state machines

Abstract

Signature monitoring has proven to be an effective method for concurrent detection of control-flow errors in processors. A recent proposal adapts signature monitoring to the concurrent checking of dedicated controllers or state machines. The authors extend this approach and present theoretical results, including existence-of-solution guarantees, as well as new, efficient synthesis algorithms. The algorithms have been implemented and successfully applied to a variety of machines including all of the machines in the MCNC benchmark set. For most examples, the evaluation and synthesis algorithms exhibit negligible running times and the resulting optimized machines exhibit reasonable overheads. There is strong indication that the efficient synthesis of self-monitoring, and possibly self-testing, state machines is feasible using this approach.<>