Design and synthesis of self-checking VLSI circuits

Self-checking circuits can detect the presence of both transient and permanent faults. A self-checking circuit consists of a functional circuit that produces encoded output vectors and a checker that checks the output vectors. The checker has the ability to expose its own faults as well. The functional circuit can be either combinational or sequential. A self-checking system consists of an interconnection of self-checking circuits. The advantage of such a system is that errors can be caught as soon as they occur; thus, data contamination is prevented. Methods for the cost-effective design of combinational and sequential self-checking functional circuits and checkers are examined. The area overhead for all proposed design alternatives is studied in detail. >