Survivability in Satellite Instrument Control Applications

Abstract

A small fault tolerant system is described which has been designed as an instrument controller for space applications. It uses three processor modules and some limited shared resources. Central to the operation of this system is the manner in which the information on the performance of both hardware and software is updated and voted using adaptive voters. The system uses triplicated TMR to construct a dual level architecture and is capable of graceful degradation to duplex and even simplex configurations. A possible extension to five processors is outlined.