High-level synthesis for on-line testability

Abstract

On-line testing increases hardware reliability, which is essential in safety-critical applications, particularly in hostile operating conditions. High-level synthesis, on the other hand, offers fast time-to-market and allows quick and painless design space exploration. This thesis details the realisation of on-line testability, in the form of self-checking design, within a high-level synthesis environment. The MOODS (Multiple Objective Optimisation in Data and control path Synthesis) high-level synthesis suite is used for the implementation of this concept.

A high-level synthesis tool typically outputs controller / datapath hardware architectures. These two parts pose different self-checking problems that require different solutions. Datapath self-checking is realised using duplication and inversion testing schemes within the circuit data-flow graph. The challenge therein is to identify and implement suitable high-level transformations and algorithms to enable the automatic addition of self-checking properties to the system functionality. This further involves the introduction of an expression quantifying on-line testability and including it in the standard high-level synthesis cost function, thus materialising a three-dimensional design space, to be explored by the designer feeding the synthesis tool with the problem specifications and constraints.

In contrast, controller self-checking is not implemented within the synthesis process, but is rather the result of a post-processing synthesis step, directly applying an appropriate checker to the system control signals. Nevertheless, challenges include choosing suitable self-checking techniques, achieving the Totally Self-Checking (TSC) goal, and investigating ways to reuse any existing datapath self-checking resources for controller on-line testability. Solutions based both on parity-checking and on straightforward 1-hot checking are given, again providing the designer with enhanced opportunities for time-efficient experimentation in search for the best solution in every given synthesis project.

The self-checking structures are finally verified theoretically and experimentally, through fault simulation. Overall, the enhanced version of the MOODS system, produced as a result of this research work, enables the implementation of reliable electronics efficiently, so that reliability-critical applications can be accommodated in a mass production context.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record

ASCII CitationAtomBibTeXData Cite XMLDublin CoreDublin CoreEP3 XMLEndNoteHTML CitationHTML CitationHTML ListJSONMETSMODSMPEG-21 DIDLOpenURL ContextObjectOpenURL ContextObject in SpanRDF+N-TriplesRDF+N3RDF+XMLRIOXX2 XMLReferReference ManagerSimple Metadata