Analysis of Combinational Circuit Failure Rate Based on Graph Partitioning and Probabilistic Binomial Approach

This paper studies the fault propagation and the correctness rate calculation of combinatorial circuits. We rely on circuit partitioning and on a probabilistic approach close to a binomial distribution, assuming some simultaneous faults have a certain probability to occur in the circuit’s gates. We extend the results of our Clusterized Probabilistic Binomial Reliability model (CPBR), in which we obtained the results for several combinatorial multiplier designs, as seen in our previous publication. We now target non-arithmetic combinatorial netlists and, among them, a few circuits with flip-flop instances. We use the graph representation of the combinatorial netlists and we generalize our approach with a generic algorithm for CPBR. To develop this algorithm, we use some existing work on multilevel acyclic hypergraph partitioning, that we adapt to acyclic directed graphs. Furthermore, we address the problem of calculating correctness rates of circuits in cases where sequential flip-flops induce cycles in the graph. Our experiments show that our approach is capable of analysing the error and the correctness rates of significant non-arithmetic circuits, with an automatized and generic tool.