Mitigation of permanent faults in adaptive equalizers

As electronic technology scales, reliability becomes an increasingly important problem. The use of small transistors makes the devices more vulnerable to radiation effects that can lead to permanent failures. Manufacturing defects become also more common due to the small geometries and the large number of transistors used in the integrated circuits (ICs). These defects lower the production yield thus increasing the cost. In this paper those issues are addressed at the system-level for adaptive equalizers that are commonly used in communication ICs. The proposed fault-mitigation approach can be used to deal with both manufacturing defects and permanent failures during the device operation. By exploiting the structure and functionality of equalizers, fault mitigation is provided with negligible area overhead and small performance degradation when a fault occurs.