Title
A resource-efficient probabilistic fault simulator.
Abstract
The reduction of CMOS structures into the nanometer regime, as well as the high demand for low-power applications, animating to further reduce the supply voltages towards the threshold, results in an increased susceptibility of integrated circuits to soft errors. Hence, circuit reliability has become a major concern in today's VLSI design process. A new approach to further support these trends is to relax the reliability requirements of a circuit, while ensuring that the functionality of the circuit remains unaffected, or effects remain unnoticed by the user. To realize such an approach it is necessary to determine the probability of an error at the output of a circuit, given an error probability distribution at the circuits' elements. Purely software-based simulation approaches are unsuitable due to the large simulation times. Hardware-accelerated approaches exist, but lack the ability to inject errors based on probabilities, are slow or have a large area overhead. In this paper we propose a novel approach for FPGA-based, probabilistic, circuit fault simulation. The proposed system is a mainly hardwarebased, which makes the simulation fast, but also keeps the hardware overhead on the FPGA low by exploiting FPGA specific features.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1109/FPL.2013.6645581
FPL
Keywords
Field
DocType
CMOS integrated circuits,circuit simulation,error statistics,field programmable gate arrays,integrated circuit reliability,statistical distributions,CMOS structure reduction,FPGA,VLSI design process,circuit elements,circuit reliability,error probability distribution,low-power applications,nanometer regime,probabilistic circuit fault simulation,resource-efficient probabilistic fault simulator,software-based simulation approach,supply voltages
Computer science,Circuit reliability,Circuit extraction,Circuit design,Real-time computing,Physical design,Fault Simulator,Mixed-signal integrated circuit,Very-large-scale integration,Equivalent circuit
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1946-1488
3
0.46
References 
Authors
5
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
David May130.46
Walter Stechele236552.77