A Framework for Comprehensive Automated Evaluation of Concurrent Online Checkers

This paper proposes a framework for automated evaluation of concurrent online checkers. The novelty of the underlying approach lies in its completeness (i.e. ability of formally proving the presence or absence of true misses), minimal fault detection latency and accurate, fully automated evaluation of the fault detection characteristics of the checkers. The methodology consists of creating a pseudo-combinational version of the circuit under test, specifying the environment in terms of valid input stimuli and providing the assertions for generating the checkers, which will thereafter be evaluated by the framework. In this paper, a case-study on the control part (routing and arbitration) of a Network-on-Chip (NoC) router has been carried out. It shows on a realistic application that the framework is capable of accurately and formally evaluating the quality of individual concurrent checkers which constitutes an important task in fault tolerant system design. The case study shows that the proposed approach helps achieving high fault coverage in a single clock-cycle.