Multiple-Error Interceptive Voter Designs for Safety-Critical Applications

This paper proposes multiple-error interceptive voter designs for safety-critical applications. The proposed baseline voters comprise two-stage error-filters, in which the first stage includes two parallel C-elements (CEs) and the second stage includes one CE to filter soft errors. The voters have high-speed versions, any of which is embedded with a high-speed path from its original input to its output to reduce delay. Simulation results demonstrate the soft error tolerance of the proposed voters. Moreover, compared with the triple-modular-redundancy (TMR) voter that can only tolerate single soft errors, the proposed 3-input baseline and 4-input high-speed voters can tolerate double soft errors and can reduce the area-power-delay product by 77.03% and 95.05%, respectively, due to the use of a few transistors and a high-speed path. The voters are extended to intercept N-1 soft errors, N being the number of inputs of each voter. Note that the voters are also extended to make so that they can tolerate hard/permanent errors in addition to soft errors.