Evaluating the Reliability of Integer Multipliers With Respect to Permanent Faults

Arithmetic circuits form the foundation of modern digital computation, enabling us to conduct precise mathematical operations and drive the digital age. They are integral components in nearly every digital circuit, such as processors' arithmetic and logic units. Especially in safety-critical domains like automotive and aviation, the flawless operation of these circuits is of paramount importance. This paper presents a case study involving two variants of Dadda multipliers and assesses their intrinsic reliability when affected by permanent hardware faults. We conducted extensive fault injection campaigns on the circuit models under various datasets, presenting the aggregated statistical errors in the form of the mean absolute error (MAE) for each case. Specifically, we performed fault injection campaigns in which the operands are sourced from trained quantized weights of a convolutional neural network, as well as randomly generated sets of integers. The results not only reveal differences between the two circuits but also show significant variations when different datasets are used in the fault injection campaigns.