Techniques for estimation of design diversity for combinational logic circuits

Design diversity has long been used to protect redundant systems against common-mode failures. The conventional notion of diversity relies on "independent" generation of "different" implementations of the same logic function. This concept is qualitative and does not provide a basis to compare the reliabilities of two diverse systems. In a recent paper, we presented a metric to quantify diversity among several designs. The problem of calculating the diversity metric is NP-complete and can be of exponential complexity. In this paper we present techniques to estimate the value of the design diversity metric. For datapath designs, we have formulated very fast techniques to calculate the value of the metric by exploiting the regularity in the datapath structures. For general combinational logic circuits, we present an adaptive Monte-Carlo simulation technique for estimating bounds on the value of the metric. The adaptive Monte-Carlo simulation technique provides accurate estimates of the design diversity metric; the number of simulations used to reach this estimate is polynomial (instead of exponential) in the number of circuit inputs. Moreover, the number of simulations can be tuned depending on the desired accuracy.