A Solution to Single Point of Failure Using Voter Replication and Disagreement Detection

Abstract

This paper suggests a method, called distributed voting, to overcome the problem of the single point of failure in a TMR system used in robotics and industrial control applications. It uses time redundancy and is based on TMR with disagreement detector feature. This method masks faults occurring in the voter where the TMR system can continue its function properly. The method has been evaluated by injecting faults into Vertex2Pro and Vertex4 Xilinx FPGAs An analytical evolution is also performed. The results of both evaluation approaches show that the proposed method can improve the reliability and the mean time to failure (MTTF) of a TMR system by at least a factor of (2-R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">V</sub> (t)) where R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">V</sub> (t) is the reliability of the voter