Fault-tolerant digital filters on FPGA using hardware redundancy techniques

As the technology is growing rapidly in recent years, communication and signal processing systems become more complex with the increase in a number of elements or devices. To produce more reliable devices by eliminating the errors occurred by transient faults, there is a need for fault-tolerant techniques like Dual Modular Redundancy, Triple Modular Redundancy, and N-Modular Redundancy. These techniques often contain hardware redundancy which allows continued operation in the presence of faults and recovers the faulty hardware quickly and efficiently. Digital filters are one of the most commonly used in many applications, communications with filtering applications, data storage in CD-ROM or any hard disk drive, audio processing applications, and video processing applications. In this paper, different 5-modular redundancy configurations are used to get better performance, to lower the total power dissipation and to occupy less area. The circuits are synthesized and implemented on Altera EP4CE115F29C7 FPGA device using Quartus II 13.1 synthesis tool.