Hardware Implementation of a Fault-Tolerant Hopfield Neural Network on FPGAs

This letter presents an FPGA implementation of a fault-tolerant Hopfield NeuralNetwork (HNN). The robustness of this circuit against Single Event Upsets (SEUs) and Single Event Transients (SETs) has been evaluated. Results show the fault tolerance of the proposed design, compared to a previous non fault- tolerant implementation and a solution based on triple modular redundancy (TMR) of a standard HNN design

Status Report of Neutral Kaon photo-production study using Neutral Kaon Spectrometer 2 (NKS2) at LNS-Tohoku(I. Nuclear Physics)

The approach described in this paper uses an array of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices to implement a fault tolerant hardware system that can be compared to the running of fault tolerant software on a traditional processor. Fault tolerance is achieved is achieved by using FPGA with on the fly partial programmability feature. Major considerations while mapping to the FPGA includes the size of the area to be mapped and communication issues related to their communication. Area size selection is compared to the page size selection in Operating System Design. Communication issues between modules are compared to the software engineering paradigms dealing with module coupling, fan-in, fan-out and cohesiveness. Finally, the overhead associated with the downloading of the reconfiguration files is discussed

Fault-tolerant fpga for mission-critical applications.

One of the devices that play a great role in electronic circuits design, specifically safety-critical design applications, is Field programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). This is because of its high performance, re-configurability and low development cost. FPGAs are used in many applications such as data processing, networks, automotive, space and industrial applications. Negative impacts on the reliability of such applications result from moving to smaller feature sizes in the latest FPGA architectures. This increases the need for fault-tolerant techniques to improve reliability and extend system lifetime of FPGA-based applications. In this thesis, two fault-tolerant techniques for FPGA-based applications are proposed with a built-in fault detection region. A low cost fault detection scheme is proposed for detecting faults using the fault detection region used in both schemes. The fault detection scheme primarily detects open faults in the programmable interconnect resources in the FPGAs. In addition, Stuck-At faults and Single Event Upsets (SEUs) fault can be detected. For fault recovery, each scheme has its own fault recovery approach. The first approach uses a spare module and a 2-to-1 multiplexer to recover from any fault detected. On the other hand, the second approach recovers from any fault detected using the property of Partial Reconfiguration (PR) in the FPGAs. It relies on identifying a Partially Reconfigurable block (P_b) in the FPGA that is used in the recovery process after the first faulty module is identified in the system. This technique uses only one location to recover from faults in any of the FPGA’s modules and the FPGA interconnects. Simulation results show that both techniques can detect and recover from open faults. In addition, Stuck-At faults and Single Event Upsets (SEUs) fault can also be detected. Finally, both techniques require low area overhead

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

Methodology of highly reliable systems design

Práce představuje alternativní metodiku k již existujícím technikám pro návrh číslicových systémů se zvýšenou spolehlivostí implementovaných do obvodů FPGA a doplňuje některé nové vlastnosti při realizaci a testování těchto systémů. Práce se opírá o využití částečné dynamické rekonfigurace obvodu FPGA při návrhu systémů odolných proti poruchám, kde může být částečná rekonfigurace využita jako mechanizmus pro opravu a zotavení systému po výskytu poruchy. Práce nejprve představuje obecné principy diagnostiky, testování a spolehlivosti číslicových systémů včetně stručného popisu programovatelných obvodů FPGA a jejich architektury. Dále pokračuje přehledem současných metod a technik při návrhu a implementaci systémů odolných proti poruchám do obvodů FPGA, kde jsou popsány zejména techniky z oblasti detekce a lokalizace poruch, opravy a posuzování kvality návrhu. Nejdůležitější částí práce je popis metodiky pro návrh, implementaci a testování systémů odolných proti poruchám, která byla vytvořena pro obvody FPGA, jejichž konfigurační paměť je založena na pamětech typu SRAM. Nejprve je prezentována technika pro vytváření a automatizované generování hlídacích obvodů pro číslicové systémy a komunikační protokoly v FPGA, následně je prezentovaná referenční architektura spolehlivého systému implementovaného do FPGA včetně několika odolných architektur využívajících principu částečné dynamické rekonfigurace jako mechanizmu opravy a zotavení po výskytu poruchy. Dále je popsán způsob řízení rekonfiguračního procesu a testovací platforma pro snadné testovaní a ověření kvality systémů odolných proti poruchám implementovaných dle navržené metodiky. V závěru jsou diskutovány experimentální výsledky a přínos práce.In the thesis, a methodology alternative to existing methods of digital systems design with increased dependability implemented into FPGA is presented, new features which can be used in the implementation and testing of these systems are demonstrated. The research is based on the use of FPGA partial dynamic reconfiguration for the design of fault tolerant systems. In these applications, the partial dynamic reconfiguration can be used as a mechanism to correct the fault and recover the system after the fault occurrence. First, the general principles of diagnostics, testing and digital systems dependability are presented including a brief description of FPGA components and their architectures. Next, a survey of currently used methods and techniques used for the design and implementation of fault tolerant systems into FPGA is described, especially the methods used for fault detection and localization, their correction, together with the principles of evaluating fault tolerant systems design quality.  The most important part of the thesis is seen in the description of the design methodology, implementation and testing of fault tolerant systems implemented into FPGAs which uses SRAMs as the configuration memory. First, the methodology of developing and automated checker components design for digital systems and communication protocols is presented. Then, a reference architecture of a dependable system implemented into FPGA is demonstrated including several fault tolerant architectures based on the use of partial dynamic reconfiguration as the mechanism of fault correction and the recovery from it. The principles of controlling the reconfiguration process are described together with the description of the test platform which allows to test and verify the design of fault tolerant systems based on the methodology presented in the thesis. The experimental results and the contribution of the thesis are discussed in the conclusions.

Improving reconfigurable systems reliability by combining periodical test and redundancy techniques: a case study

This paper revises and introduces to the field of reconfigurable computer systems, some traditional techniques used in the fields of fault-tolerance and testing of digital circuits. The target area is that of on-board spacecraft electronics, as this class of application is a good candidate for the use of reconfigurable computing technology. Fault tolerant strategies are used in order for the system to adapt itself to the severe conditions found in space. In addition, the paper describes some problems and possible solutions for the use of reconfigurable components, based on programmable logic, in space applications

Fault-Tolerant Application-Specific Topology based NoC and its Prototype on an FPGA

Application-Specific Networks-on-Chips (ASNoCs) are suitable communication platforms for meeting current application requirements. Interconnection links are the primary components involved in communication between the cores of an ASNoC design. The integration density in ASNoC increases with continuous scaling down of the transistor size. Excessive integration density in ASNoC can result in the formation of thermal hotspots, which can cause a system to fail permanently. As a result, fault-tolerant techniques are required to address the permanent faults in interconnection links of an ASNoC design. By taking into account link faults in the topology, this paper introduces a fault-tolerant application-specific topology-based NoC design and its prototype on an FPGA. To place spare links in the ASNoC topology, a meta-heuristic algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is proposed. By taking link faults into account in ASNoC design, we also propose an application mapping heuristic and a table-based fault-tolerant routing algorithm. Experiments are carried out for a specific link and any link fault in fault-tolerant topologies generated by our approach and approaches reported in the literature. For the experimentation, we used the multi-media applications Picture-in-Picture (PiP), Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) - 4, MP3Encoder, and Video Object Plane Decoder (VOPD). Experiments are run on software and hardware platforms. The static performance metric communication cost and the dynamic performance metrics network latency, throughput, and router power consumption are examined using software platform. In the hardware platform, the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used to validate proposed fault-tolerant topologies and analyze performance metrics such as application runtime, resource utilization, and power consumption. The results are compared with the existing approaches, specifically Ring topology and its modified versions on both software and hardware platforms. The experimental results obtained from software and hardware platforms for a specific link and any link fault show significant improvements in performance metrics using our approach when compared with the related works in the literature.publishedVersio