New hardware redundancy approach for making modules tolerate faults using a new fault detecting voter unit structure

Electronic systems' growth causes complexity and increases the risk of failure. Fault tolerance structures are one of the useful ideas for resolving this problem. In this paper, a fault tolerant approach to digital electronic modules is introduced, using hardware redundancy to make those modules fault tolerant. The proposed structure of hardware redundancy has a voter unit that can mask and detect faults at the same time. Such a voter unit is achieved by using both majority voter units and minority voter units in its structure. The proposed voter unit has a three-layer structure. One minority voter, three majority voters, and another minority voter are respectively producing these three layers of the proposed voter unit. These layers can mask and correct fault and detect the faulty module by producing a unique fault detecting code simultaneously. The code works properly as long as the majority of the modules work properly. Then, the result of the voter unit (the code) is transmitted to a relevant switching unit in order to switch the faulty module with a spare module. A redundant system based on the proposed redundancy structure with M spare modules can switch M faulty modules and tolerate (M + 1) faults.