Employment of Reduced Precision Redundancy for Fault Tolerant FPGA Applications

Abstract

This research explores the employment of Reduced Precision Redundancy (RPR) as a powersaving alternative to traditional Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR). This paper focuses on the details of RPR implementation and the effect of RPR fault tolerance on the performance of spacecraft systems. RPR-protected system performance is evaluated using a signal-to-noise ratio analogy developed with MATLAB and Simulink computational tools. This research demonstrates that RPR is an effective fault tolerance approach for arithmetic operations Experimental results show that the benefit of RPR increases with the complexity of the operation to which it is applied.System performance simulations demonstrate that RPR provides very good recovery from errors caused by SEE in spacecraft systems.

An efficient BER-based reliability method for SRAM-based FPGA

“…Depending on the level of space radiation and orbital position, a controller choses between five different modes of reliability to achieve better resources utilization and power saving. Sullivan et al make a comparison between TMR and Reduced Precision Redundancy (RPR) in [11], and found that the RPR approach can be a practical alternative method for protecting arithmetic operations with an acceptable loss of precision on the result if a fault occurs.…”

Mitigation of Radiation Effects in SRAM-Based FPGAs for Space Applications

“…The idea of applying RPR to FPGAs in space systems goes back to several works at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey [Snodgrass 2006;Sullivan 2008;Sullivan et al 2009;Gavros et al 2011] and was later followed up by Bratt et al [Pratt et al 2011;Pratt et al 2013]. Instead of using three redundant copies of a module, one module processes data with full precision while the two other modules process the data with reduced precision.…”