ENROL project team received best paper award at ASYNC 2021

For their paper "Towards Explaining the Fault Sensitivity of Different QDI Pipeline Styles" the team of the FWF project "Ensuring Robustness in Low-Power Asynchronous Circuits (ENROL)", namely Patrick Behal, Florian Huemer, Robert Najvirt, Andreas Steininger (project lead), and Zaheer Tabassam, received the best paper award at ASYNC21, the premier conference on asynchronous circuits and systems.

The paper analyzes the sensitivity of different asynchronous pipeline templates to transient faults, along with the effectiveness of related mitigation techniques. Its key contributions are

performing an analysis on a relatively large set of implementation styles and topologies,
giving, for the first time, a like-for-like comparison of styles and mitigation techniques under identical experimental conditions,
identifying those parameters that are main contributors to the sensitivity

The analysis is based on more than 100 millions of fault injections that have been performed in a digital gate-level simulation. Performing and interpreting this huge number of experiments in a controlled way is a challenge of its own and required a sophisticated and efficient toolset for fault injection that is also briefly introduced in the paper.

The IEEE International Symposium on Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (ASYNC) has, since its first edition in 1994, established itself as the premier venue for for researchers to present their latest findings in the area of asynchronous design.