Analysis of redundancy techniques for electronics design—case study of digital image processing

Abstract

Electronic circuits/systems operating in harsh environments such as space are likely to experience faults or failures due to the impact of high-energy radiation. Given this, to overcome any faults or failures, redundancy is usually employed as a hardening-by-design approach. Moreover, low power and a small silicon footprint are also important considerations for space electronics since these translate into better energy efficiency, less system weight, and less cost. Therefore, the fault-tolerant design of electronic circuits and systems should go hand in hand with the optimization of design metrics, especially for resource-constrained electronics such as those used in space systems. A single circuit or system (also called a simplex implementation) is not fault-tolerant as it may become a single point of failure and is not used for a space application. As an alternative, a triple modular redundancy (TMR) implementation, which uses three identical copies of a circuit or system and a voter to perform majority voting of the circuits and systems outputs, may be used. However, in comparison with a simplex implementation, a TMR implementation consumes about 200% more area and dissipates 200% more power when circuits or systems are triplicated. To mitigate the area and power overheads of a TMR implementation compared to a simplex implementation, researchers have suggested alternative redundancy approaches such as selective TMR (STMR) insertion, partially approximate TMR (PATMR), fully approximate TMR (FATMR), and majority voting-based reduced precision redundancy (VRPR). Among these, VRPR appears to be promising, especially for inherently error-tolerant applications such as digital image/video/audio processing, which is relevant to space systems. However, the alternative redundancy approaches mentioned are unlikely to be suitable for the implementation of control logic. In this work, we analyze various redundancy approaches and evaluate the performance of TMR and VRPR for a digital image processing application. We provide MATLAB-based image processing results corresponding to TMR and VRPR and physical implementation results of functional units based on TMR and VRPR using a 28-nm CMOS technology.