Residue code based low cost SEU-tolerant fir filter design for OBP satellite communication systems

Abstract

With the development of satellite communications, on-board processing (OBP) obtains more and more attentions due to the increased efficiency and performance. However, the large amounts of digital circuits in the OBP transponders are sensitive to the high-energy particles in space radiation environments, which may cause various kinds of single event effect. Among these effects, single event upset (SEU) is the major potential reason for the instability of the satellite communication systems. Triple modular redundancy (TMR) is a classical and effective method for mitigating the SEU in digital circuits. However, since three identical logic modules and a voting circuit are needed in TMR, the overhead is so high that the scheme may not be applicable on the on-board digital processing platform with very limited area and power resources. Therefore, how to design a more cost-effective fault-tolerant method becomes a critical issue. Considering that FIR-like processing is frequently used on OBP platform, in this article, a dual modules (DM) plus checking module based on residue code (DM-CRC) architecture for SEU-tolerant FIR design is proposed. Although this architecture reduces the area overhead dramatically, we find that the fault missing rate is still high if single-sample checking (SSC) is used. To solve this problem, a Multi-sample checking DM-CRC (MSC-DM-CRC) is further proposed. Our analysis shows that the MSC-DM-CRC scheme can make the fault missing rate small enough without reducing the actual throughput. By simulations it is shown that, when the modulus for CRC is 7 and the number of samples for MSC is 4, the reduction of area overhead relative to TMR is over 20% and the fault missing rate is as low as 0.05%.

Simplified fault‐tolerant FIR filter architecture based on redundant residue number system

“…It can be seen that when the redundant modulus is m 4 (the largest modulus of the four-moduli set), the proposed FIR filter can detect and correct all soft errors caused by SEU. Conclusion: A low-cost fault-tolerant FIR filter based on RRNS and a three-moduli set RTBC is developed, which achieves 21, 27 and 31% of area reduction compared with the standard RRNS [6,7]. When SEU happens, the proposed fault-tolerance architecture can realise a zero fault missing rate.…”

“…Hence, it leads to a large area reduction for the conventional RRNS to replace the four-moduli set RTBC by the three-moduli set counterpart. Although the architectures proposed in [6,7] require no RTBC, two identical FIR filters plus a checking module based on residue code are required. Besides requiring more than twice the hardware resources, the former exists fault missing event and the latter introduces additional noise at the FIR outputs.…”

“…Table 1 summarises the area occupation of different fault-tolerance schemes. Since the filters depicted in [6,7] are implemented in a field programmable gate array platform, the resource is measured by the number of slices. We can obtain the relative value by calculating the ratio of the number of used slices between [6,7] and the TMR.…”

“…Since the filters depicted in [6,7] are implemented in a field programmable gate array platform, the resource is measured by the number of slices. We can obtain the relative value by calculating the ratio of the number of used slices between [6,7] and the TMR. It can be demonstrated that our proposed filter architecture has a significant advantage in area occupation compared with the other SEU mitigation schemes.…”

Special issue on satellite communication systems and networking

“…The next paper entitled "Residue code-based low cost SEU-tolerant FIR filter design for OBP satellite communication systems" [5] proposes a dual modules (DM) plus checking module based on residue code (DM-CRC) architecture for SEU-tolerant FIR design. Moreover, a multi-sample checking DM-CRC (MSC-DM-CRC) is further proposed in order to reduce the fault missing rate.…”