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M Függer, A. Steininger, E. Armengaud:
"Safely Stimulating the Clock Synchronization Algorithm in Time-Triggered Systems - A Combined Formal and Experimental Approach";
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 5 (2009), 2; 132 - 145.

In this paper, we demonstrate that pipelining is a viable approach for speeding up the distributed fault-tolerant DARTS clock generation approach introduced in (F\"ugger, Schmid, Fuchs, Kempf, EDCC'06), where a distributed Byzantine fault-tolerant tick generation algorithm has been used to replace the traditional quartz oscillator and highly balanced clock tree in VLSI Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). We provide a pipelined version of the original DARTS algorithm, termed pDARTS, together with a novel modeling and analysis framework for hardware-implemented asynchronous fault-tolerant distributed algorithms, which is employed for rigorously analyzing its correctness & performance. Our results, which have also been confirmed by an experimental evaluation of an FPGA prototype implementation, reveal that pipelining indeed allows to entirely remove the adverse effect of large interconnect delays on the achievable clock frequency, and demonstrate again that methods and results from distributed algorithms research can successfully be applied in the VLSI context.

Automotive electronics, clock synchronization, FlexRay, formal verfication, time-triggered communication, TTP/C

http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TIL.2009.2017526

Project Head Andreas Steininger:
Nützen von Synchronität für transparentes Testen von Kommunikationsdiensten