Reliability & Fault Tolerance

This lecture creates basic knowledge and understanding of the design, application and evaluation of fault tolerant and reliable systems.

Due to scaling down of transistor dimensions and therefore electronic components, the costs of integrated circuits and systems are further reduced while the susceptablibity to faults is increasing.  To manufacture reliable circuits in advanced technologies, it is therefore required to apply fault tolerant design methods, which are amoung others subject of the lecture.  Accordingly, the lecture covers:

• structural vs. functional faults
• Hardware test methods, including BIST/Scan
• Built-in Self-Repair (BISR)
• Fault tolerant flip-flops
• Fault tolerant processors
• Fault tolerance in Software,
• Fault tolerance in analogue circuits
• Resilient systems
• On-line fault detection
• Fault tolerance and partial fault tolerance 
• Error correction in memories vs. error correction in data transmission
• Test data compression
• System reliability (Availability, Safety, Maintenance)
• Modelling of reliability (Markov-models)

The lecture includes practical examples and requires an active collaboration of the students.