FT-EST Framework: Reliability Estimation for the Purposes of Fault-Tolerant Systems Design Automation

Fault-Tolerant, Fault Tolerance Property Estimation, FT-EST, Verification, High-Level Synthesis, Redundant Data Type.

The complexity of today's systems is growing along with the level of chip integration. This results in higher demand for reliability techniques; it also increases the difficulty of incorporating reliability in such systems. For this purpose, we are working on a method to automate reliability insertion; however, for this method, it is necessary to have feedback on the result. In this paper, one component of the automation flow enabling the estimation of the resulting reliability - Fault Tolerance ESTimation (FT-EST) framework - is presented along with an improvement for accelerating the time necessary to reach the estimation. For the purpose of evaluation, we are using our Redundant Data Types approach, which enables us to intentionally insert reliability in a particular operation. The estimation utilizes the concept of fault injection. The results indicate, that the concept of Redundant Data Types is functional, however, also suggest its future improvements (e.g. for the operation of subtraction).