A Design of Fault-Tolerant System for Safety-Critical Systems

In safety-critical systems where failures or faults can lead to accidents, especially in special and harsh environments like those encountered in spacecraft, it is well known that multiple levels of errors can significantly increase the likelihood of system failure. For instance, system-level errors may occur due to cable breaks caused by severe vibrations, while gate-level errors can arise from radiation effects on System-on-Chip (SoC) semiconductors. Furthermore, in such specialized environments, human repair is often not feasible, necessitating that the system continue to operate even when a fault occurs in a part of it. Therefore, this research discusses the design, implementation, and evaluation of a redundant system that combines multi-level redundancy mechanisms to tolerate multiple errors and maintain operation. The implementation was carried out on the Space I/O Core (SIOC), a System-on-Chip equipped with processors and I/O for distributed real-time systems. Additionally, bitstreams were created from the implemented logic, and the performance of the fault-tolerant system was evaluated using an actual FPGA.