A One-Cycle Correction Error-Resilient Flip-Flop for Variation-Tolerant Designs on an FPGA

Abstract

Timing error resilience (TER) is one of the most promising approaches for eliminating design margins that are required due to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations. However, traditional TER circuits have been designed typically on an application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) where customized circuits and metastability detector designs at a transistor level are possible. On the other hand, it is difficult to implement those designs on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) due to its predefined LUT structure and irregular wiring. In this paper, we propose an error detection and correction flip-flop (EDACFF) on an FPGA chip, where the metastability issue can be resolved by imposing proper timing constraints on the circuit structures. The proposed EDACFF exploits a transition detector for detecting a timing error along with a data correction latch for correcting the error with one-cycle performance penalty. Our proposed EDACFF is implemented in a 3-bit counter circuit employing a 5-stage pipeline on a Spartan-6 FPGA device (the XFC6SLX45) to verify the functional and timing behavior. The measurement results show that the proposed design obtains 32% less power consumption and 42% higher performance compared to a traditional worst-case design.