Reliability Analysis and Distributed Voting for NMR Nanoscale Systems

Redundancy techniques, such as N-tuple modular redundancy, has been widely used to correct faulty behavior of components and achieve high reliability. However, the NMR systems, and many other redundancy-based strategies, are all based on majority voting. The voter, therefore, becomes a bottleneck for the correct operation of any NMR system. In this paper, we propose a defect-tolerant strategy based on distributed voting mechanism to design a robust NMR system. We show that using a novel communication-inspired mechanism, namely logic code division multiple access, we can transfer data with extremely low error rates among N modules and completely eliminate the need for a centralized voter unit. Such a highly reliable strategy is vital for future nano systems in which high defect rate is expected. Experimental results are also reported to verify the concept, clarify the design procedure and measure the system's reliability.