Power, Delay and Area Comparisons of Majority Voters relevant to TMR Architectures
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N-modular redundancy (NMR) is commonly used to enhance the fault tolerance of a circuit/system, when subject to a fault-inducing environment such as in space or military systems, where upsets due to radiation phenomena, temperature and/or other environmental conditions are anticipated. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), which is a 3-tuple version of NMR, is widely preferred for mission-control space, military, and aerospace, and safety-critical nuclear, power, medical, and industrial control and automation systems. The TMR scheme involves the two-times duplication of a simplex system hardware, with a majority voter ensuring correctness provided at least two out of three copies of the hardware remain operational. Thus the majority voter plays a pivotal role in ensuring the correct operation of the TMR scheme. In this paper, a number of standard-cell based majority voter designs relevant to TMR architectures are presented, and their power, delay and area parameters are estimated based on physical realization using a 32/28nm CMOS process.
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