A Novel Reduced-Precision Fault-Tolerant Floating-Point Multiplier

This paper presents a new fault-tolerant architecture for floating-point multipliers in which the fault-tolerance capability is achieved at the cost of output precision reduction. In this approach, to achieve the faulttolerant floating-point multiplier, the hardware cost of the primary design is reduced by output precision reduction. Then, the appropriate redundancy is utilized to provide error detection/correction in such a way that the overall required hardware becomes almost the same as the primary multiplier. The proposed multiplier can tolerate a variety of permanent and transient faults regarding the acceptable reduced precisions in many applications. The implementation results reveal that the 17-bit and 14-bit mantissas are enough to obtain a floating-point multiplier with error detection or error correction, respectively, instead of the 23-bit mantissa in the IEEE-754 standardbased multiplier with a few percent area and power overheads.