HLS-based sensitivity-inductive soft error mitigation for satellite communication systems

Soft errors induced by space radiation environments seriously influence the reliability of spacecrafts in space and satellite communications, especially with ever shrinking geometries, higher-density circuits, and power saving techniques. Most of the existing soft error mitigation methods depend on triple modular redundancy (TMR) or dual-modular redundancy (DMR) to the original design target directly, which enlarge the resource overhead dramatically. In this paper, the high level synthesis (HLS) is considered to help to reduce the resource consumptions of TMR or DMR. By the HLS on node sensitivity, all design resources can be classified into three types: sensitive submodules, semi-sensitive sub-modules, and insensitive submodules. TMR can be applied for sensitive sub-modules to provide the highest reliability, while gate sizing can be applied for semi-sensitive sub-modules, which can help to mitigate the soft errors and to minimize the overhead introduced by the fault-tolerant techniques efficiently. In order to verify the effectiveness of the above proposal, appropriate scheduling schemes combined with the HLS are performed to an FIR filter. By simulations it is shown that, with the reduction of area relative to TMR over 60% for the FIR design, the reliability can reach over 99.9%.