UDC 681.32
FEATURES OF RADIATION HARDENED FPGAs MAJORITY VOTE CIRCUITS
S. F. Tyurin, Honored Inventor of the Russian Federation, Doctor of Technical Sciences, Professor at the Department of Automation and Telemechanic, Perm National Research Polytechnic University; This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Radiation resistance onboard equipment aerospace is one of the urgent tasks of the present stage of digital technology. An example of such equipment may be a control system of the Mars rover NASA Curiosity. In order to increase the radiation resistance the expensive manufacturing technologies of integrated circuits, for example, Silicon-on-insulator, SOI, are used. Furthermore, extensive use of structural redundancy, such as triple redundancy hardware takes place. In addition, as a method of providing radiation resiliency – RHBD (Radiation Hardened by Design) structural redundancy, for example, triple redundancy of equipment (Triple Modular Redundancy, TMR) is widely used. Programmable logic integrated circuits (FPGA- fieldprogrammable gate array) due to the large number of configuration memory cells are not vulnerable to the effects of radiation. In this connection, once-programmable FPGA (e.g., Actel company) are used, but flipflops must also be reserved. In multiple programmable FPGA chip of Xilinx series by VirtexTM company triple structural redundancy (backup majoritarian voting for most, the choice of 2 of 3) is used. The majority vote circuits based on 3-state buffers with Pullup resistors and Minority Vote Circuits, implemented by setting LUT (Look Up Table) are used. However, the sources of available products, some technical details are not disclosed.
Aim: To study features of majority circuits peculiarities used in programmable logic integrated FPGA Virtex circuits from Xilinx and not being disclosed by the manufacturer in detail, as well as to develop improved circuit variants.
Key words: triple module redundancy, majority vote, minority vote, 3-state buffer.