A Novel Clock-Fault Detection and Self-Recovery Circuit for Reliable Nanoelectronics System

Abstract

Due to discrepancies in manufacturing process and the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomenon, faulttolerant architectures are a prerequisite to build reliable nanoelectronic systems from unreliable nanoelectronic devices. Various defects and interference such as doping discrepancies, supply noise and cross-talks could lead to clock irregularity and malformed clock signals in nanoelectronic systems, thus resulting in faulty operations of sequential circuits. As a result, fault tolerance clock distribution is more and more important in nanoelectronic systems. In this paper, a novel architecture for clock recovery is delivered. Very simple circuit is designed for time-to-voltage converter with transforming the error of time to the error of voltage. In order to illustrate the fault-tolerance capability by the detection and recovery circuitry, a prototype CMOS design of this proposed circuit is presented. Simulation shows that the proposed architecture is very suite for integration to nanoelectronic circuit design to realize clock recovery. Keywordstime-to-voltage convertion; self-recovery; faulttolerance; clock