Fault tolerant voting circuits: A Dual-Modular-Redundancy approach for Single-Event-Transient mitigation

Abstract

As device dimensions shrink and operating frequencies increase in modern technologies, Single Event Transient faults present significant challenges. These arises from the susceptibility to radiation-induced errors and decreasing feature sizes, which can propagate through logic circuits and result in incorrect system behavior, reducing reliability, particularly concerning internal nodes of combinational voting circuits.

This paper emphasizes the importance of voting schemes focusing on specific Dual Modular Redundancy lock-step architectures where the voting system is made of a comparator with parity and a recovery signal. The study includes both theoretical and practical fault injection analyses and proposes a novel voting structure designed to reduce the failure rate to 0.4% in cases of Input-Internal faults. This achievement represents the lowest failure rate reported in the literature when compared to conventional DMR lock-step comparators and Self voter approaches without filtering mechanisms. The proposed solution significantly enhances fault resilience, with only a slight increase in hardware utilization and frequency performance.