Organizing a Finite State Machine with Higher Resistance to Soft Failures and Soft Failure Registration
Introduction: Up-to-date design rules used in computer engineering make hardware unreliable when working under radiation. A hit of a charged particle causes a «soft failure», i.e. a situation when the hardware is still usable but the information transmitted through it or stored in it is corrupted. Some research revealed that soft failures occur more often in memory units than in combinational circuits. This is why the known engineering solutions like structural redundancy are not efficient enough in the case of soft failures. Purpose: Developing new circuitry solutions for a finite state machine experiencing a flow of soft failures. Results: The developed structure of a Moore automaton with triple redundancy of its internal memory, double redundancy of its output signals and self-recovery on each synchronization clock period has a higher resistance to soft errors which can occur in its combinational circuits or internal memory. The structure also contains tools to count the soft failures during its functioning. A technique is proposed to estimate the reliability and structural complexity of the developed structure.