Radiation-Hardened Triple Modular Redundant Serial Communication System Using Triple Communication Lines

An earthquake occurred in Japan has caused a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011. Currently, a decommissioning work is planned at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. However, the radiation intensity of the melted reactors exceeds 1,000 Sv/h. Since the radiation intensity is too severe to human, robots must be used for the decommissioning work. In order to remotely monitor and control the decommissioning robots, a radiation-hardened communication system is necessary. However, currently available very large-scale integrations (VLSIs) are vulnerable to radiation. The total-ionizing-dose tolerance is not sufficient. Therefore, we have been developing a radiation-hardened serial communication system with a triple modular redundant structure on an DE1-SoC field programmable gate array (FPGA). This paper presents the radiation-hardened communication system and its experimental results.