Automatic Generation of High Coverage Transient Fault Detectors Using Goldmine

We propose a formal technique for automatic generation of tran­ sient fault detectors for flip-flops/latches in control logic. We apply GoldMine, an automatic assertion generation engine based on data mining and formal verification to generation of fault detectors. The GoldMine tool flow is modified to include fault coverage evalu­ ation of assertions. Our formal technique is sound and complete with respect to injected faults and provides an accurate assessment of coverage. Our technique is also able to identify faults critical to overall design vulnerability. We demonstrate high fault cover­ age on OR 1200 processor, Space Wire RTL and ITC benchmarks. We extract a minimal high coverage subset of fault detectors for synthesis and show that it has minimal performance overhead.