Radiation Hard Electronics for Advanced Communication Systems

Advanced reconfigurable/reprogrammable communication systems will require use of commercial sub 100 nm electronics. Legacy radiation tolerant circuits fail to provide Single Event Upset (SEU) immunity at speeds greater than 500 MHz. New base level logic circuits are needed to provide SEU immunity for high speed circuits afforded by sub 100 nm technology. A completely new circuit and system approach called Self Recovery Logic is proposed for development herein which is able to function at the full speed afforded by the fabrication process and able to tolerate SEU impacts not possible with legacy circuits. Moreover, a truly fault tolerant system is proposed which is projected to replace Triple Modular Redundancy as the on-chip means for fault tolerance. With the proposed building blocks in place, advanced reconfigurable and reprogrammable high speed devices can be implemented. A multiprocessor with advanced error correction and data compression capability is proposed for future development.

Reprogrammable/reconfigurable communication systems implemented with fault tolerant electronics have direct applications in Defense systems. In the past, every custom high-performance ICs processor designed for NASA has been eventually incorporated in defense systems. There is every reason to believe this will be true for the new electronic technology. Sub 100 nm electronics is becoming the basis for most commercial electronic systems today. It is conjectured by many that radiation effects will impact terrestrial applications as the transistor feature sizes become smaller. In real time control applications, radiation effects can have costly impacts in terms of financial, physical or human loss. Real time control is evident in aircraft, security, financial transaction, equipment control, and even automobile systems. It is extremely difficulty to diagnose a SEU issues because they are not easily repeatable, and therefore it may take some time before the SEU problem becomes evident. SRL electronics can become the solution for such applications in future commercial systems.

Self Recovery Logic (SRL) that provides high speed SEU tolerant solutions which are effective for sub 100 nm electronics will be used in the design of most, if not all, future NASA special purpose processors. Legacy solutions do not work for high speed circuits and TMR is too burdensome. From the basis developed herein, an entirely new SRL electronic circuit library will be created for automatic synthesis of custom chips using commercial CAD tools, enabling NASA engineers to utilize commercial electronic foundries to produce reconfigurable/reprogrammable communication systems and other custom chip applications. SRL technology might the only non-TMR solution for the use of sub 100 nm electronics.

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