Fault-Tolerant Resynthesis for Dual-Output LUTs

We present a fault-tolerant post-mapping resynthesis for FPGA-based designs that exploits the dual-output feature of modern FPGA architectures to improve reliability of a mapped circuit against faults. Emerging FPGA architectures, such as 6-LUTs in Xilinx Virtex5 and 8-input ALMs in Altera Stratix-III, have a secondary LUT output that allows access to non-occupied SRAM bits. We show that this architectural feature can be used to build redundancy for fault masking with limited area, power, and performance overhead. Our algorithm improves reliability of a mapping by performing two basic operations: duplication (in which free configuration bits are used to duplicate a logic function whose value is obtained on the secondary output) and encoding (in which two copies of the same logic function are ANDed or ORed together in the fanout of the duplicated logic). The problem of fault tolerant post-mapping resynthesis is then formulated as the optimal duplication and encoding scheme that ensures minimal circuit fault rate w.r.t. a stochastic single fault model. We show an ILP formulation of this problem and an efficient algorithm based on generalized network flow. On MCNC benchmarks, experimental results show that for combinational circuits the proposed approach improves mean time-to-failure by 25% with 4% area overhead, and the proposed approach with explicit area redundancy improves MTTF by 113% with 36% area overhead, compared to the baseline mapping by ABC. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first systematic study that exploits dual-output LUT architectures for FPGA fault tolerance.