On the Design of Self-Checking Controllers with Datapath Interactions

We consider the problem of designing self-checking controllers for controller/datapath architectures. We introduce the concept of intrinsically secure states. We present six alternative schemes based on parity checking, on 1-out-of-n checking, as well as on the observation that a self-checking sequential datapath can also be employed for control path self-checking by exploiting the concept of intrinsically secure control states. A high-level synthesis tool has been modified to automatically insert self-checking controllers and datapath units and is able to trade this self-checking property against other design objectives. We discuss the properties of each configuration and present experimental results and conclusions