Fault Tolerant Signal Processing for Nano-scale VLSI Circuit Technology

Adaptive fault tolerance (AFT) takes advantage of non-canonical adaptive filter architectures that use adaptive principles to achieve automatic fault recovery. Recent work has demonstrated the capability of AFT methods to mask single and multiple stuck-at bit errors in the filter coefficients, and also to demonstrate the capability of AFT filters to resist the effects of soft errors. This paper explores several approaches to fault tolerance that can be used in VLSI adaptive filters that are prone to soft errors caused by scaling down of feature dimensions and voltage thresholds.