Power-Oriented Monitoring of Clock Signals in FPGA Systems for Critical Application

Abstract

This paper presents a power-oriented monitoring of clock signals that is designed to avoid synchronization failure in computer systems such as FPGAs. The proposed design reduces power consumption and increases the power-oriented checkability in FPGA systems. These advantages are due to improvements in the evaluation and measurement of corresponding energy parameters. Energy parameter orientation has proved to be a good solution for detecting a synchronization failure that blocks logic monitoring circuits. Key advantages lay in the possibility to detect a synchronization failure hidden in safety-related systems by using traditional online testing that is based on logical checkability. Two main types of power-oriented monitoring are considered: detecting a synchronization failure based on the consumption and the dissipation of power, which uses temperature and current consumption sensors, respectively. The experiments are performed on real FPGA systems with the controlled synchronization disconnection and the use of the computer-aided design (CAD) utility to estimate the decreasing values of the energy parameters. The results demonstrate the limited checkability of FPGA systems when using the thermal monitoring of clock signals and success in monitoring by the consumption current.