Power analysis and diagnosis of faults in VLSI circuits

FPGA based Fault injection and Fault tolerance techniques are used to evaluate and validate the reliability of VLSI circuits. This approach combines the efficiency of hardware based techniques and the flexibility of simulation based techniques. The system efficiency and robustness increases as the reconfiguration of FPGA is not needed for each fault experiment. Fault injection is performed using commercial VHDL simulation tools such as static and dynamic methods. Instrumented 2 bit multiplier circuits were employed to evaluate the fault injection technique. The power analysis results provided for fault free, stuck-at-0 and stuck-at-l faults in digital circuits validate the point that faulty circuits dissipate more and hence draw more power.