A Case Study of Self-Checking Circuits Reliability

In this paper, we analyze the reliability of self-checking circuits. A case study is presented in which a fault-tolerant system with duplicated self-checking modules is compared to the TMR version. It is shown that a duplicated self-checking system has a much higher reliability than that of the TMR counterpart. More importantly, the reliability of the selfchecking system does not drop as sharply as that of the TMR version. We also demonstrate the trade-offs between hardware complexity and error handling capability of self-checking circuits. Alternative self-checking designs where some hardware redundancies are removed with the lost of fault-secure and/or self-testing properties are also studied