Sj. Zhang et Jc. Muzio, EVALUATING THE SAFETY OF SELF-CHECKING CIRCUITS, JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC TESTING-THEORY AND APPLICATIONS, 6(2), 1995, pp. 243-253
In this paper, we consider the evaluation of the safety of a self-chec
king circuit with combinational logic. Since the circuit is tested und
er normal operation, it may stay in different states such as a perfect
state in which any erroneous output can be detected, unstable states
in which an erroneous output may be detected or may not, a safe-state
when the erroneous output has been caught, and a fail-state because th
e erroneous output is undetected, as time goes on. Consequently, we pr
opose a fail-safe evaluation, using a Markov model to describe the sta
te transitions and predicate the probability of the circuit not being
in the fail-state. We include a comparison with existing evaluation me
thods, the proposed approach being more practical because it estimates
the safety of the circuit, which is reducing as time goes on, instead
of giving a constant probability measure.