Dependability-Increasing Method of Processors under a Space Radiation Environment

Abstract

Optically reconfigurable gate arrays (ORGAs) can be reconfigured using error-inclusive configuration contexts under a radiation-rich space environment. Therefore, the ORGA presents an important benefit: the allowable amount of configuration data damage is greater than that by field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with error-checking and correction. However, the ORGA’s programmable gate array itself is never as robust against space radiation as that of an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) because the programmable architecture of its gate array is the same as that of FPGAs. Therefore, to achieve a drastic increase in the robust capability of a fine-grained programmable gate array on an ORGA-VLSI, this paper presents a proposal of a novel dynamic module multiple redundancy scheme based on a mono-instruction set computer architecture exploiting high-speed dynamic reconfiguration.