Minimalist recovery techniques for single event effects in spaceborne microcontrollers

This paper presents a fault-tolerant design approach to allow the use of non-hardened commodity microcontrollers as embedded computing nodes in spacecraft, where a high rate of transient errors and occasional latch ups are expected due to the space radiation environment. In order to preserve their primary advantage of high functional density, low-cost approaches were explored that leverage features of existing commercial microcontrollers. A built-in, high-speed serial port is used for voting among redundant devices and a novel wire-OR output voting scheme exploits the bidirectional controls of I/O pins. A fault-tolerant node testbed was implemented, and fault-insertion tests were conducted to test the effectiveness of the fault-tolerance techniques.