Evaluating the Reliability of Different Voting Schemes for Fault Tolerant Approximate Systems

This work presents a study on the reliability of voters for approximate fault tolerant systems in the context of single event effects and electromagnetic interference. A first case study analyses different topologies of single-bit majority voters for logic circuits employing fault injection by simulation. In these simulations, an analysis is first performed to identify the critical diffusion areas of the physical implementation according to the voter input vector. Additionally, as a second case study, practical heavy ion experiments on different architectures of software-based approximate voters for mixed-signal applications are also presented, and the cross section of each voter is evaluated. The system comprising the voters was irradiated in two distinct experiments with an 16O\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^{16}O$$\end{document} ion beam, producing an effective LET at the active region of 5.5 MeV/mg/cm2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$^2$$\end{document}. As a complementary study, a conducted electromagnetic interference injection was also performed, considering two distinct voting schemes. Results of the case-studies allow identifying the most tolerant voter architectures (among the studied ones) for approximate computing applications under single event effects and electromagnetic interference.