Adaptive reconfigurable voting for enhanced reliability in medium-grained fault tolerant architectures

Abstract

The impact of SRAM-based FPGAs is constantly growing in aerospace industry despite the fact that their volatile configuration memory is highly susceptible to radiation effects. Therefore, strong fault-handling mechanisms have to be developed in order to protect the design and make it capable of fighting against both soft and permanent errors. In this paper, a fully reconfigurable medium-grained triple modular redundancy (TMR) architecture which forms part of a runtime adaptive on-board processor (OBP) is presented. Fault mitigation is extended to the voting mechanism by applying our reconfiguration methodology not only to domain replicas but also to the voter itself. The proposed approach takes advantage of adaptive configuration placement and modular property of the OBP, thus allowing on-line creation of different medium-grained TMRs and selection of their granularity level. Consequently, we are able to narrow down the fault-affected area thus making the error recovery process faster and less power consuming. The conventional hardware based voting is supported by the ICAP-based one in order to additionally strengthen the reconfigurable intermediate voting. In addition, the implementation methodology ensures using only one memory footprint for all voters and their voting adaptations thus saving storing resources in expensive rad-hard memories.