A study on the Design Techniques and Analysis of Fault-Tolerant Computers

The art of designing and analyzing fault-tolerant computers is surveyed with special emphasis on problems of analyzing the behavior of computers that have autonomous repair capability. The survey covers the following topics : (1) general issues in computer reliability, (2) fault-tolerance state relations and requirements, (3) computational hierarchy, (4) fault characteristics, (5) fault diagnosis, (6) fault-tolerance schemes for logic network and machines, (7) fault-coverage effects, and (8) fault-tree analysis of coverage. This paper does not include techniques for verifying nonredundant hardware or system software designs or for verifying the correctness of application programs.