Full-hardware triple modular and penta-modular redundancies using a high frequency majority voting operation

Correct operations of embedded systems are expected under strong radiation conditions prevailing in space and in nuclear power plants. In strong radiation environments, since soft errors frequently occur in embedded systems, majority voting operations are always used to remove soft errors. However, in strong radiation environments, even if majority voting operations are implemented in software code, soft errors cannot be removed perfectly since software majority voting operations are conducted at low frequency. Therefore, we propose full-hardware triple-modular and penta-modular redundancies using a high-frequency majority voting operation. The soft-error tolerance of a system depends on the frequency of the majority voting operation. Full-hardware triple-modular and penta-modular redundancies can achieve high-speed majority voting operations of over 100 MHz. This paper presents experimentally obtained results of the radiation tolerances of triple-modular and penta-modular redundancies against alpha particles using a 4 MBq Am241 radiation source.