A Novel Modular Radiation Hardening Approach Applied to a Synchronous Buck Converter

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.

Radiation Tolerant Electronics

“…The heavy-ion results indicated a satisfactory radiation tolerance, especially for the DICE CRAMs. A novel four module radiation hardening approach for FPGA was presented in [12]. This was implemented on a zynq-7000 development board (Zybo) and it was shown that the proposed method could be used for a radiation tolerant synchronous buck converter design for applications requiring a relatively longer mission time, compared to the TMR and FMR techniques.…”

High-Performance and Disruptive Computing in Remote Sensing: HDCRS—A new Working Group of the GRSS Earth Science Informatics Technical Committee [Technical Committees]

“…Nonetheless, the use of COTS devices implies the necessity of applying mitigation techniques to increase the robustness of the application performance in environments exposed to radiation. In this sense, different radiation-hardenedby-design (RHBD) strategies have been developed over the years to protect FPGA-based designs against radiation [84]- [86], such as dual-modular-redundancy schemes for detecting errors and triple-modular-redundancy designs for error masking.…”

A High-Reliability Redundancy Scheme for Design of Radiation-Tolerant Half-Duty Limited DC-DC Converters

“…The Mean-Time-to-Failure (MTTF) [21] and reliability comparisons of the methods are shown in Table 2. As can be seen from Table 2, the proposed technique is superior for relatively longer mission time applications than either TMR or TMR/Simplex techniques.…”

“…The MTTF is derivable from the reliability of a given system. The details are given in reference [21].…”

“…This is because, after the first failure, TMR is equivalent to a system of two modules in series, with the failure rate double that of a Simplex system. If Rm is the reliability of one of the modules (Simplex system), the reliability equation of the TMR system if an ideal voter is assumed is given by [21]:…”