Designs for diagnosability and reliability in VLSI systems

Novel concepts of designs for diagnosability and reliability are defined and developed. A diagnosable design of VLSI system is presented, in which fault isolation is realized by minimal additional hardware instead of traditional software diagnostic procedures such that the computation space and time for fault isolation are saved. The presented fault-tolerant design uses online fault detection and isolation techniques, yields higher reliability with minimized hardware overhead of no more than 125% as opposed to over 200% in classical redundancy fault-tolerant designs. Using this scheme, the ability to isolate intermittent faults is a significant improvement over existing fault isolation methods because faults could be isolated right after they are detected