Abstract
Radiation and extreme temperature are the main inhibitors for the use of electronic devices in space applications. Radiation challenges the normal and stable operation of DC-DC converters, used as power supply for onboard systems in satellites and spacecrafts. In this situation, special design techniques known as radiation hardening or radiation tolerant designs have to be employed. In this work, a module level design approach for radiation hardening is addressed. A module in this sense is a constituent of a digital controller, which includes an analog to digital converter (ADC), a digital proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a digital pulse width modulator (DPWM). As a new Radiation Hardening by Design technique (RHBD), a four module redundancy technique is proposed and applied to the digital voltage mode controller driving a synchronous buck converter, which has been implemented as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation block in MATLAB/Simulink using Xilinx system generator based on the Zynq-7000 development board (ZYBO). The technique is compared, for reliability and hardware resources requirement, with triple modular redundancy (TMR), five modular redundancy (FMR) and the modified triplex–duplex architecture. Furthermore, radiation induced failures are emulated by switching all duplicated modules inputs to different signals, or to ground during simulation. The simulation results show that the proposed technique has 25% and 30%longer expected life compared to TMR and FMR techniques, respectively, and has the lowest hardware resource requirement compared to FMR and the modified triplex–duplex techniques.
Highlights
Outer space is full of radiation sources that include solar wind, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, galactic cosmic rays, Van Allen radiation belts, solar particle events, etc
25% and 30%longer expected life compared to triple modular redundancy (TMR) and five modular redundancy (FMR) techniques, respectively, and has the lowest hardware resource requirement compared to FMR and the modified triplex–duplex techniques
There is 61%and 66% improvement in mean time to failure (MTTF) compared to TMR and FMR methods, respectively
Summary
Outer space is full of radiation sources that include solar wind, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, galactic cosmic rays, Van Allen radiation belts, solar particle events, etc. SEE cause abrupt changes or transient behavior in circuits Such effects, interfere with space systems’ electronics operation, and, in some cases, threaten the survival of such systems. The study of techniques to keep electronic circuits operational in such hostile environment has increased [2], driven by the increasing number of applications of radiation tolerant circuits, such as space missions, satellites, high-energy physics experiments, etc. The most common radiation mitigation techniques are TMR and FMR methods [6,7] They are highly-efficient but very costly and are used for situations where high reliability is targeted. The failure rate λ is defined as the number of failures per unit time, compared with the number of surviving components.
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