Transient-fault tolerant VHDL descriptions: a case-study for area overhead analysis

We present a new approach to design reliable complex circuits with respect to transient faults in memory elements. These circuits are intended to be used in harmful environments like radiation. During the design flow this methodology is also used to perform an early-estimation of the obtained reliability level. Usually, this reliability estimation step is performed in the laboratory, by means of radiation facilities (particle accelerators). By doing so, the early-estimated reliability level is used to balance the design process into a trade-off between maximum area overhead due to the insertion of redundancy and the minimum reliability required for a given application. This approach is being automated through the development of a CAD tool (FT-PRO). Finally, we present also a case-study of a simple microprocessor used to analyze the FT-PRO performance in terms of the area overhead required to implement the fault-tolerant circuit.