Synthesis of Circuits with Low-Cost Concurrent Error Detection Based on Bose-Lin Codes

This paper presents a procedure for synthesizing sequential machines with concurrent error detection based on Bose-Lin codes. Bose-Lin codes are an efficient solution for providing concurrent error detection as they are separable codes and have a fixed number of check bits, independent of the number of information bits. Furthermore, Bose-Lin code checkers have a simple structure as they are based on modulo operations. Procedures are described for synthesizing circuits in a way that their structure ensures that all single-point faults can only cause errors that are detected by a Bose-Lin code. This paper presents an efficient scheme for concurrent error detection in sequential circuits with no constraint on the state encoding. Concurrent error detection for both the state bits and the output bits is based on a Bose-Lin code and their checking is combined such that one checker suffices. Results indicate low area overhead. The cost of concurrent error detection is reduced significantly compared to other methods based on other codes.