Optimized Fault-Tolerant Adder Design Using Error Analysis

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are often used in space, military, and commercial applications due to their re-programmable feature. FPGAs are semiconductor components susceptible to soft errors due to radiation effects. Fault tolerance is a critical feature for improving the reliability of electronic and computational components in high-safety applications. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) is electronic systems’ most commonly used fault-tolerant technique. TMR is reliable and efficient to recover the single-event upsets. However, the limitation of this technique is the area overhead. Prior work has proposed many conventional fault-tolerant approaches that have been unable to avoid area overhead. This paper introduces a novel work related to an error analysis-based technique. This technique works with an error percentage, and a preferential algorithm, which is also proposed to reduce the hardware complexity in the existing works. This technique can be applied on various types of arithmetic circuits. The proposed technique is applied to the adder circuit to verify the hardware usage, power consumption, and delay; it has been implemented on the Proasic3e 3000 FPGA. The simulated results were observed as 39.89% fewer IO cells, 47.10% fewer core cells, and 5.32% less power as compared to the TMR-based adder.