ESTA: An Efficient Method for Reliability Enhancement of RT-Level Designs

This paper proposes a novel and efficient method for RT level online testing. Our method makes every RT-level resource online-testable, and guarantees high single stuck-at fault detection (i.e., high reliability) with low area/latency overhead. This method uses available resources in their dead intervals (the intervals during which a resource is not being used) to test active resources. The area and/or latency overhead are due to concurrent operation of active and inactive resources. This method is evaluated by fault simulating several benchmark designs before and after applying the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that after applying our method, online fault coverage is significantly improved