Synthesis of controllers with concurrent checking: method and case studies

Presents a method for introducing, with a very low overhead, online test facilities in the controller of an application specific circuit. The online test consists in detecting, in the control flow graph, the illegal paths which may be due either to permanent faults or to transient errors. The implementation of the detection facilities relies on a clever choice of the state codes of the controller, which can then be checked by signature analysis. The monitor required for this verification is of very low complexity and can easily be implemented on chip. The necessary CAD tools (controller structure analysis and optimized state assignment) have been developed and have allowed a high number of examples to be processed. These case studies have been performed in particular on international benchmarks and on controllers of application specific microprocessors. The results are reported