A novel low overhead fault tolerant Kogge-Stone adder using adaptive clocking

As the feature size of transistors gets smaller, fabricating them becomes challenging. Manufacturing process follows various corrective design-for-manufacturing (DFM) steps to avoid shorts/opens/bridges. However, it is not possible to completely eliminate the possibility of such defects. If spare units are not present to replace the defective parts, then such failures cause yield loss. In this paper, we present a fault tolerant technique to leverage the redundancy present in high speed regular circuits such as Kogge-Stone adder (KSA). Due to its regularity and speed, KSA is widely used in ALU design. In KSA, the carries are computed fast by computing them in parallel. Our technique is based on the fact that even and odd carries are mutually exclusive. Therefore, defect in even bit can only corrupt the even Sum outputs whereas the odd Sums are computed correctly (and vice versa). To efficiently utilize the above property of KSA in presence of defects, we perform addition in two- clock cycles. In cycle-1, one of the correct set of bits (even or odd) are computed and stored at output registers. In cycle-2, the operands are shifted by one bit and the remaining sets of bits (odd or even) are computed and stored. This allows us to tolerate the defect at the cost of throughput degradation while maintaining high frequency and yield. The proposed technique can tolerate any number of faults as long as they are confined to either even or odd bits (but not in both). Further, this technique is applicable for any type of fault model (stuck-at, bridging, complete opens/shorts). We performed simulations on 64-bit KSA using 180nm devices. The results indicate that the proposed technique incur less that 1% area overhead. Note that there is very little throughput degradation (0.3%) for the fault-free adders. The proposed technique utilizes the existing scan flip-flops for storage and shifting operation to minimize the area/performance overhead. Finally, the proposed technique is used in a superscalar processor, whereby the faulty adder is assigned lower priority than fault-free adders to reduce the overall throughput degradation. Experiments performed using Simplescalar for a superscalar pipeline (with four integer adders) show throughput degradation of 0.5% in the presence of a single defective adder

High Performance Digital Circuit Techniques

Achieving high performance is one of the most difficult challenges in designing digital circuits. Flip-flops and adders are key blocks in most digital systems and must therefore be designed to yield highest performance. In this thesis, a new high performance serial adder is developed while power consumption is attained. Also, a statistical framework for the design of flip-flops is introduced that ensures that such sequential circuits meet timing yield under performance criteria. Firstly, a high performance serial adder is developed. The new adder is based on the idea of having a constant delay for the addition of two operands. While conventional adders exhibit logarithmic delay, the proposed adder works at a constant delay order. In addition, the new adder's hardware complexity is in a linear order with the word length, which consequently exhibits less area and power consumption as compared to conventional high performance adders. The thesis demonstrates the underlying algorithm used for the new adder and followed by simulation results. Secondly, this thesis presents a statistical framework for the design of flip-flops under process variations in order to maximize their timing yield. In nanometer CMOS technologies, process variations significantly impact the timing performance of sequential circuits which may eventually cause their malfunction. Therefore, developing a framework for designing such circuits is inevitable. Our framework generates the values of the nominal design parameters; i.e., the size of gates and transmission gates of flip-flop such that maximum timing yield is achieved for flip-flops. While previous works focused on improving the yield of flip-flops, less research was done to improve the timing yield in the presence of process variations

A Novel Low Overhead Fault Tolerant Kogge-Stone Adder Using Adaptive Clocking

Abstract — As the feature size of transistors gets smaller, fabricating them becomes challenging. Manufacturing process follows various corrective design-for-manufacturing (DFM) steps to avoid shorts/opens/bridges. However, it is not possible to completely eliminate the possibility of such defects. The bridging defects and inline resistances (due to poor contact/open defects) pose obstruction to the switching node and manifest themselves as stuck-at failures under a strict timing constraint. On the other hand, shorts with Vdd or Vss completely block the node from switching. If spare units are not present to replace the defective parts, then such failures cause yield loss. In this paper, we present a fault tolerant technique to leverage the redundancy present in high speed regular circuits such as Kogge-Stone Adder (KSA). Due to its regularity and speed, KSA is widely used in ALU design. In KSA, the carries are computed fast by computing them in parallel. Our technique is based on the fact tha

Design and Implementation of Fault Tolerant Adders on Field Programmable Gate Arrays

Fault tolerance on various adder architectures implemented on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) is studied in this thesis. This involves developing error detection and correction techniques for the sparse Kogge-Stone adder and comparing it with Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) techniques. Fault tolerance is implemented on a Kogge-Stone adder by taking advantage of the inherent redundancy in the carry tree. On a sparse Kogge-Stone adder, fault tolerance is realized by introducing additional ripple carry adders into the design. The implementation of this fault tolerance approach on the sparse Kogge-Stone adder is successfully completed and verified by introducing faults either on the ripple carry adder or in the carry tree. Two types of Xilinx FPGAs were used in this study: the Spartan 3E and Virtex 5. The fault tolerant adders were analyzed in terms of their delay and resource utilization as a function of the widths of the adders. The results of this research provide important design guidelines for the implementation of fault tolerant adders on FPGAs. The Triple Modular Redundancy-Ripple Carry Adder (TMR-RCA) is the most efficient approach for fault tolerant design on an FPGA in terms of its resources due to its simplicity and the ability to take advantage of the fast-carry chain. However, for very large bit widths, there are indications that the sparse Kogge-Stone adder offers superior performance over an RCA when implemented on an FPGA. Two fault tolerant approaches were implemented using a sparse Kogge-Stone architecture. First, a fault tolerant sparse Kogge-Stone adder is designed by taking advantage of the existing ripple carry adders in the architecture and adopting a similar approach to the TMR-RCA by inserting two additional ripple carry adders into the design. Second, a graceful degradation approach is implemented with the sparse Kogge-Stone adder. In this approach, a faulty block is permanently replaced with a spare block. As the spare block is initially used for fault checking, the fault tolerant capability of the circuit is degraded in order to continue fault-free operation. The adder delay is smaller for the graceful degradation approach by approximately 1 ns from measured results and 2 ns from the synthesis results independent of the bit widths when compared with the fault tolerant Kogge-Stone adder. However, the resource utilization is similar for both adders

Techniques of Energy-Efficient VLSI Chip Design for High-Performance Computing

How to implement quality computing with the limited power budget is the key factor to move very large scale integration (VLSI) chip design forward. This work introduces various techniques of low power VLSI design used for state of art computing. From the viewpoint of power supply, conventional in-chip voltage regulators based on analog blocks bring the large overhead of both power and area to computational chips. Motivated by this, a digital based switchable pin method to dynamically regulate power at low circuit cost has been proposed to make computing to be executed with a stable voltage supply. For one of the widely used and time consuming arithmetic units, multiplier, its operation in logarithmic domain shows an advantageous performance compared to that in binary domain considering computation latency, power and area. However, the introduced conversion error reduces the reliability of the following computation (e.g. multiplication and division.). In this work, a fast calibration method suppressing the conversion error and its VLSI implementation are proposed. The proposed logarithmic converter can be supplied by dc power to achieve fast conversion and clocked power to reduce the power dissipated during conversion. Going out of traditional computation methods and widely used static logic, neuron-like cell is also studied in this work. Using multiple input floating gate (MIFG) metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) based logic, a 32-bit, 16-operation arithmetic logic unit (ALU) with zipped decoding and a feedback loop is designed. The proposed ALU can reduce the switching power and has a strong driven-in capability due to coupling capacitors compared to static logic based ALU. Besides, recent neural computations bring serious challenges to digital VLSI implementation due to overload matrix multiplications and non-linear functions. An analog VLSI design which is compatible to external digital environment is proposed for the network of long short-term memory (LSTM). The entire analog based network computes much faster and has higher energy efficiency than the digital one

Robustness Analysis of Controllable-Polarity Silicon Nanowire Devices and Circuits

Substantial downscaling of the feature size in current CMOS technology has confronted digital designers with serious challenges including short channel effect and high amount of leakage power. To address these problems, emerging nano-devices, e.g., Silicon NanoWire FET (SiNWFET), is being introduced by the research community. These devices keep on pursuing Mooreâs Law by improving channel electrostatic controllability, thereby reducing the Off âstate leakage current. In addition to these improvements, recent developments introduced devices with enhanced capabilities, such as Controllable-Polarity (CP) SiNWFETs, which make them very interesting for compact logic cell and arithmetic circuits. At advanced technology nodes, the amount of physical controls, during the fabrication process of nanometer devices, cannot be precisely determined because of technology fluctuations. Consequently, the structural parameters of fabricated circuits can be significantly different from their nominal values. Moreover, giving an a-priori conclusion on the variability of advanced technologies for emerging nanoscale devices, is a difficult task and novel estimation methodologies are required. This is a necessity to guarantee the performance and the reliability of future integrated circuits. Statistical analysis of process variation requires a great amount of numerical data for nanoscale devices. This introduces a serious challenge for variability analysis of emerging technologies due to the lack of fast simulation models. One the one hand, the development of accurate compact models entails numerous tests and costly measurements on fabricated devices. On the other hand, Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations, that can provide precise information about devices behavior, are too slow to timely generate large enough data set. In this research, a fast methodology for generating data set for variability analysis is introduced. This methodology combines the TCAD simulations with a learning algorithm to alleviate the time complexity of data set generation. Another formidable challenge for variability analysis of the large circuits is growing number of process variation sources. Utilizing parameterized models is becoming a necessity for chip design and verification. However, the high dimensionality of parameter space imposes a serious problem. Unfortunately, the available dimensionality reduction techniques cannot be employed for three main reasons of lack of accuracy, distribution dependency of the data points, and finally incompatibility with device and circuit simulators. We propose a novel technique of parameter selection for modeling process and performance variation. The proposed technique efficiently addresses the aforementioned problems. Appropriate testing, to capture manufacturing defects, plays an important role on the quality of integrated circuits. Compared to conventional CMOS, emerging nano-devices such as CP-SiNWFETs have different fabrication process steps. In this case, current fault models must be extended for defect detection. In this research, we extracted the possible fabrication defects, and then proposed a fault model for this technology. We also provided a couple of test methods for detecting the manufacturing defects in various types of CP-SiNWFET logic gates. Finally, we used the obtained fault model to build fault tolerant arithmetic circuits with a bunch of superior properties compared to their competitors