Complete and effective robustness checking by means of interpolation

Abstract

Technology scaling continues to downscale feature sizes. As a side-effect this has some serious drawbacks, in particular increasing vulnerability of circuits against transient faults caused, e.g., by radiation. Even under malfunctions of internal components the circuit must behave as specified. Several techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem. However, the implementation of those techniques in the design might be buggy and needs to be verified. This paper provides an effective algorithm using formal reasoning to completely analyze the fault tolerance of a circuit, under all input sequences and all transient faults. The algorithm based on interpolation identifies components in which transient faults are observable. Experiments show that the newly introduced complete approach analyzes ITC'99 and IBM circuits, effectively.