Abstract
Redundancy techniques are commonly used to design radiation- and fault-tolerant circuits for space applications, to ensure high reliability. However, higher reliability often comes at a cost of increased usage of hardware resources. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) ensures full single fault masking, with a >200% power and area overhead cost. TMR/Simplex ensures full single fault masking with a slightly more complicated circuitry, inefficient use of resource and a >200% power and area overhead cost, but with higher reliability than that of TMR. In this work, a high-reliability Spatial and Time Redundancy (TR) hybrid technique, which does not abandon a working module and is applicable for radiation hardening of half-duty limited DC-DC converters, is proposed and applied to the design of a radiation-tolerant digital controller for a Dual-Switch Forward Converter. The technique has the potential of double fault masking with a <2% increase in resource overhead cost compared to TMR. Moreover, for a Simplex module failure rate, λ, of 5%, the Reliability Improvement Factor (RIF) over the Simplex system is 20.8 and 500 for the proposed technique’s two- and three-module implementations, respectively, compared to a RIF over the Simplex system of only 7.25 for TMR and 14.3 for the regular TMR/Simplex scheme.
Highlights
Space abounds with radiation sources that challenge the normal and stable operations of electronic circuits on board spacecraft and satellites
The three-module implementation consumes less than 2% more resources (LUT, registers), and uses one more DSP compared to the Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), but the increase in reliability is significant
The technique provides the highest reliability compared to TMR and TMR/Simplex schemes
Summary
Space abounds with radiation sources that challenge the normal and stable operations of electronic circuits on board spacecraft and satellites. Radiation may cause circuit malfunction or, in the worst case, complete failure. This necessitates the radiation-tolerant design of electronic circuits intended to be used in the space environment. Different methods have been proposed and are being used in space [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. Using radiation-hardened devices or fault-tolerant designs are the most common methods. Redundancy is one of the solutions applied to ensure a circuit is able to tolerate faults induced by radiation
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