The need for safety assurance in critical systems demand for new tools and techniques which are able to provide the required confidence while maintaining the costs relatively at a low level. Fault Injection (FI) is a technique extensively used in several domains, such as space, but sporadically used in the railways. In this chapter, we present a fault-injection tool able to complement the tradi...

Error detection plays an important role in fault-tolerant computer systems. Two primary parameters concerned for error detection are the latency and coverage. In this paper, a new, hybrid error-detection approach offering a very high coverage with no detection latency is proposed to protect the data paths of high-performance microprocessors. The feature of no detection latency is essential to r...

One way of gaining confidence in the adequacy of fault tolerance mechanisms of a system is to test the system by injecting faults and see how the system performs under faulty conditions. This thesis investigates the issues of testing software-implemented fault tolerance mechanisms of distributed systems through fault injection. A fault injection method has been developed. The method requires th...

This paper proposes a new technique to detect and eliminates temporary faults on FPGA systems. Soft core processors which can alleviate radiation induced failures is implemented on Virtex-5 FPGA’s. This Fault tolerant technique is implemented using TMR .It recovers from configuration upsets through partial reconfiguration combined with roll-forward recovery .The lockstep scheme used here elimin...

Increasing vulnerability of transistors and interconnects due to scaling is continuously challenging the reliability of future microprocessors. Lifetime reliability is gaining attention over performance as a design factor even for lower-end commodity applications. In this work we present a low-power hybrid fault tolerant architecture for reliability improvement of pipelined microprocessors by p...

This paper proposes a reliability evaluation environment for coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures. This environment is designed so that it can be easily extended to different target architectures and applications by automating the generation of the simulation inputs such as HDL codes for fault injection and configuration information. This automation enables us to explore a huge design sp...

Effects of radiation on electronic circuits used in extra-terrestrial applications and radiation prone environments need to be corrected. Since FPGAs offer flexibility, the effects of radiation on them need to be studied and robust methods of fault tolerance need to be devised. In this paper a new fault-tolerant design strategy has been presented. This strategy exploits the relation between cha...