NMR configurations with novel majority voter circuits to mask multiple module faults

Abstract

Mission, safety, and business-critical applications need uninterrupted operation with correct results. But due to the technology shrinking, the microelectronic circuits can be affected by many faults like permanent, transient, and intermittent. So, there is a considerable demand for designing fault-tolerant systems. Hardware redundancy configurations have been widely used to protect or mask faults. In this research article, to mask multiple faults, N-modular redundancy (NMR) configurations are deployed, namely 5-MR and 7-MR configurations, which are implemented to mask two and three function module errors. Two majority voter (MV) circuits with 5-MR and 7-MR have been proposed, respectively. Simulation results are obtained with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) and Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). With ASIC, 120 nm technology is used with BSIM4 Spice simulation parameters. Also, the majority voters are evaluated with a band-pass filter as the function module on Altera DE2-115 FPGA using the Quartus II synthesis tool. The very high-speed integrated circuits hardware description language is used with FPGA implementation. Simulation results reveal that the proposed MV circuits obtain better results than the existing methods.