一种面向异步FIFO的低开销容错机制研究

A low-cost fault-tolerant method for asynchronous FIFO

异步FIFO(First-In-First-Out,先进先出队列)作为数字系统中的一种基本结构,被广泛应用于设计之中。其可靠性影响整个系统能否正常运行。提出一种折叠式的容错方法,用于提高异步FIFO的可靠性。该方法通过控制逻辑绕过故障单元,大大提高异步FIFO能容忍的故障数量。另外,为了减少故障对FIFO深度的影响,在折叠式的方案基础上引入空间冗余技术。实验结果表明,与仅采用空间冗余技术的方案相比,提出的方法可以多容忍12个储存单元故障,而为容错增加的面积开销最多只多了4.19%。

Asynchronous FIFO, a basic structure in digital system, is widely used in digital design. The reliability of asynchronous FIFO can affect the entire system. This paper presents a foldable fault-tolerance approach to improve the reliability of asynchronous FIFO. Asynchronous FIFO can tolerate more failures with this method. In addition, in order to reduce the impact of faults on the depth of the FIFO, spatial redundancy is introduced on the basis of the folding method. Compared with the solution that uses only spatial redundancy, the proposed approach can tolerate 12 more failures, while the area overhead for fault tolerance only increases by 4. 19 % at most.