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A Low-Cost Reliability vs. Cost Trade-Off Methodology to Selectively Harden Logic Circuits

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Abstract

Selecting the ideal trade-off between reliability and cost associated with a fault tolerant architecture generally involves an extensive design space exploration. Employing state-of-the-art reliability estimation methods makes this exploration un-scalable with the design complexity. In this paper we introduce a low-cost reliability analysis methodology that helps taking this key decision with less computational effort and orders of magnitude faster. Based on this methodology we also propose a selective hardening technique using a hybrid fault tolerant architecture that allows meeting the soft-error rate constraints within a given design cost-budget and vice versa. Our experimental validation shows that the methodology offers huge gain (1200 ×) in terms of computational effort in comparison with fault injection-based reliability estimation method and produces results within acceptable error limits.

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Correspondence to Arnaud Virazel.

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Responsible Editor: J. P. Hayes

This work has been partially funded by the International Associate Laboratory (LIA - CNRS) French-Italian research LAboratory on hardware software Integrated Systems - LAFISI.

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Wali, I., Deveautour, B., Virazel, A. et al. A Low-Cost Reliability vs. Cost Trade-Off Methodology to Selectively Harden Logic Circuits. J Electron Test 33, 25–36 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-017-5640-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10836-017-5640-6

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