Issue No.05 - May (1975 vol.24)
D.H. Sawin , Communication/Automatic Data Processing Laboratory, U. S. Army Electronics Command
Fail-safe synchronous sequential machines produce safeside outputs when failures occur within the machine. This correspondence presents a procedure to design such machines using a modification of the on-set equation form originally presented by Tohma et al.  and later improved by Diaz et al. . A systematic procedure for state assignment and next-state equation derivation, using partition theory, is presented. From this method an easily calculated upper bound on the number of gates required-to realize a fail-safe circuit is derived.
Fail-safe design, fault-detection, reliable design, state assignments, synchronous sequential machine design.
D.H. Sawin, "Design of Reliable Synchronous Sequential Circuits", IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol.24, no. 5, pp. 567-570, May 1975, doi:10.1109/T-C.1975.224262