An Improvised Voter Architecture For TMR With Reduced Area Overhead

Abstract

The introduction of nanoscale technology causes device shrinkage, making them more vulnerable to radiation-induced effects. These radiation-induced effects are crucial in mission-critical applications such as spacecraft and nuclear power plants. In FPGAs, Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), a 3-tuple form of N-modular redundancy, is utilized to counteract these effects. TMR duplicates the original simplex system, and the majority voter ensures that two out of three systems remain operational to provide the correct output, presuming that the voter does not fail. Several voters in the literature overcome the drawbacks of the classical voter, and approximates of the conventional system can replace two of the three systems to reduce the 200 percent area overhead. In this paper, we propose a mux-based voter circuit whose input is the approximate TMR system’s output, resulting in improved fault-masking with less area and power consumption. The circuits are simulated using the Cadence 45nm CMOS process, and the results are analysed.