An improved hardware implementation of the fault-tolerant clock synchronization algorithm for large multiprocessor systems

An improved implementation of clock synchronization of multiprocessor systems in the presence of malicious faults is proposed. The proposed hardware implementation for the reference clock selection has a lower gate complexity, smaller time delay, and greater flexibility than the previously published implementation. The improvement is achieved by replacing the sorter with a counting encoder and comparators and by introducing threshold generation logic with programmable registers. The scheme has a gate complexity of O(n) and a delay of O(log n), where n is the total number of inputs to a particular clock, and is programmable for different values of n and m, the maximum number of faults.<>