XOR-Based Low Cost Checkers for Combinational Logic

Radiation induced transient faults, formerly a concern mainly for memory devices, became one important element contributing to the increase of SER of combinational logic too. Conventional mitigation techniques based on time or space redundancy, either will no longer cope with the long duration transient faults predicted for future technologies, or impose heavy penalties in terms of area, power, and/or performance. In such scenario, the development of new low cost techniques to detect transient faults in combinational logic is a mandatory issue. This paper proposes one alternative for the implementation of XOR-based low cost checkers for combinational circuits, able to detect errors with much less overhead than conventional techniques.