A survey on Dependable Digital Systems using FPGAs: Current Methods and Challenges

Abstract: Fault tolerance is increasingly being use to design Dependable Digital Systems (DDS), which refers to the capability of a system to keep performing its intended functions in existence of faults. DDS are typically used in Safety-critical system (SCS) such as medical (I&C) devices, Nuclear power Plants (I&C) devices and Aerospace (I&C) systems, the failure in these systems can cause harm to environment, death, injury to people. Different fault tolerance techniques were developed to overcome these issues and that has led to increase the reliability and dependability of applications on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). In this paper, multiple related works are present dealing with different types of faults and fault tolerance methods in FPGA based systems. Furthermore, a comparison between the evaluation metrics of previous works of Fault Tolerant (FT) techniques like hardware redundancy overhead, time delay, reliability, and performance are also present.