Design, Verification and Implementation of a Watchdog Timer for Drone Applications

Drones are becoming popular in many industrial and commercial sectors for various applications, including photography, agriculture, surveillance, and delivery services. For the proper functioning of a system with multiple processors and peripherals, continuous monitoring in the form of a watchdog is essential. In this work, the design, verification, and implementation of a watchdog are presented. The system is modelled and verified via SystemVerilog hardware description language. The implementation of the design was carried out using 15 nm technology in an operating frequency range of 18.52 GHz to 20.41 GHz. A comparison of the area, power, and performance is performed with two different corner cases of process, voltage, and temperature. The standalone performance of the design is on the order of gigahertz with 94.47 pJ of power delay product and is suitable for industrial standard high-speed and low-power drone applications.