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arXiv · 2303.14106

On the Susceptibility of QDI Circuits to Transient Faults

Raghda El Shehaby·Matthias Függer·Andreas Steininger
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Abstract

By design, quasi delay-insensitive (QDI) circuits exhibit higher resilience against timing variations as compared to their synchronous counterparts. Since computation in QDI circuits is event-based rather than clock-triggered, spurious events due to transient faults such as radiation-induced glitches, a priori are of higher concern in QDI circuits. In this work we propose a formal framework with the goal to gain a deeper understanding on how susceptible QDI circuits are to transient faults. We introduce a worst-case model for transients in circuits. We then prove an equivalence of faults within this framework and use this result to provably exhaustively check QDI circuits, a linear Muller pipeline and a cyclic Muller pipeline, for their susceptibility to produce non-stable output signals.

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Raghda El Shehaby, Matthias Függer, Andreas Steininger. 2023-03-24. On the Susceptibility of QDI Circuits to Transient Faults. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14106

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