Voter's influence on reliability of partitioned triple modular redundancy system

FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) are susceptible to single-event upsets (SEUs) in space application. Partitioned triple modular redundancy (TMR) is a technique commonly used to mitigate design failures caused by SEUs, and the voter's effect on partitioned TMR system is one significant part of the system reliability research. Aiming at this problem, a relatively reliability model for partitioned TMR system is proposed, and the voter-reliability is considered in the model. The simulation is carried out to calculate the voter influence degree on system reliability under different conditions, and the results show that the voter influence degree is determined by the ratio of failure rate and the hierarchical structure partition, so with respect to a certain system, the influence degree does not change with the space environmental alteration. The reliability model of two-layer partitioned TMR scrubbing system is built for analyzing the voter influence degree variation, comparing with the no-scrubbing system. Results from its simulation show that the system reliability is greatly improved, but the influence degrees on the system are not reduced.