Improving the reliability of FPGA circuits using triple-modular redundancy (TMR) & efficient voter placement

Triple-modular redundancy has been proposed as a technique for improving the reliability of FPGA circuits in the presence of radiation-induced SEUs. This technique masks circuit faults by voting on the output of three identical circuit modules. A critical design decision in any TMR system is the placement of voters between the TMR modules. This paper presents a technique for selecting the appropriate location of voters within feedback paths of an FPGA circuit. Voting within the feedback path will repair corrupted state variables and tolerate online repair of the FPGA configuration.