Fault Tolerant Signal Processing for Masking Transient Errors in VLSI Signal Processors

This paper proposes fault tolerant signal processing strategies for achieving reliable performance in VLSI signal processors that are prone to transient errors due to increasingly smaller feature dimensions and supply voltages. The proposed methods are based on residue number system (RNS) coding, involving either hardware redundancy or multiple execution redundancy (MER) strategies designed to identify and overcome transient errors. RNS techniques provide powerful low-redundancy fault tolerance properties that must be introduced at VLSI design levels, whereas MER strategies generally require higher degrees of redundancy that can be introduced at software programming levels.