Majority and Minority Voted Redundancy for Safety-Critical Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel majority and minority voted redundancy (MMR) scheme that achieves the same fault tolerance as N-modular redundancy (NMR) but with reduced power, area, and delay, making it suitable for safety-critical systems.

Contribution

The paper proposes the MMR scheme, demonstrating its advantages over traditional NMR in terms of efficiency and implementation in CMOS technology.

Findings

MMR circuits consume less power than NMR.

MMR circuits occupy less silicon area.

MMR provides equivalent fault tolerance to NMR.

Abstract

A new majority and minority voted redundancy (MMR) scheme is proposed that can provide the same degree of fault tolerance as N-modular redundancy (NMR) but with fewer function units and a less sophisticated voting logic. Example NMR and MMR circuits were implemented using a 32/28nm CMOS process and compared. The results show that MMR circuits dissipate less power, occupy less area, and encounter less critical path delay than the corresponding NMR circuits while providing the same degree of fault tolerance. Hence the MMR is a promising alternative to the NMR to efficiently implement high levels of redundancy in safety-critical applications.