Time-Multiplexed Online Checking

There is a growing demand for online hardware checking capability to cope with increasing in-field failures resulting from variability and reliability problems. While many online checking schemes have been proposed, their area overhead remains too high for cost-sensitive applications. In this paper, we introduce a Time-Multiplexed Online Checking (TMOC) scheme using embedded field-programmable blocks for checker implementation, which enables various system parts to be checked dynamically in-field in a time-multiplexed fashion. The test quality analyses using a probabilistic model show that TMOC could maintain high fault coverage that is similar to traditional dedicated checkers. We conducted a case study of an H.264 decoder design that demonstrates our TMOC scheme provides a significant reduction in chip area and power overhead for online checkers at the cost of increased fault detection latency. We have successfully implemented and demonstrated our proposed TMOC scheme using a single Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) chip.