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A Minimalist Fault-Tolerant Microcontroller Design for Embedded Spacecraft Computing

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Abstract

Inexpensive commodity microcontrollers are extremely attractive for offloading low-level, real-time computations from high-performance spacecraft computers due to their high functional density and low power, but they have not been widely used because of their low radiation tolerance. This paper presents a fault-tolerant microcontroller configuration specifically designed to tolerate space-radiation effects that be used for embedded real-time control in spacecraft. The requirements and fault-environment are examined, then an architecture is presented. An experimental testbed is described along with fault-insertion test results.

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Caldwell, D.W., Rennels, D.A. A Minimalist Fault-Tolerant Microcontroller Design for Embedded Spacecraft Computing. The Journal of Supercomputing 16, 7–25 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008142728784

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008142728784

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