Concurrent monitoring of PCI bus transactions for timely detection of errors initiated by FPGA-based applications

The integration of FPGAs as co-processing engines in various dependable workstations makes the real time detection of errors an important issue. Thus, concurrent error detection components should enforce the operation of such systems, in order to prevent the propagation of errors within the system. The functionality of such monitoring modules should not interfere with the performance of the workstation and must ensure high system availability. An embedded monitoring component with concurrent error detection features was implemented to illustrate the benefits of this approach. The monitor checks for PCI protocol and application errors based on the forensic analysis of a workstation with embedded FPGA-based co-processing support.