Reduced-Precision Redundancy for Reliable FPGA Communications Systems in High-Radiation Environments

Triple modular redundancy (TMR) is the traditional mitigation technique for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) subject to single-event upsets (SEUs) in high-radiation environments. Reduced-precision redundancy (RPR) as an alternative to TMR for communications systems is demonstrated. RPR reduces the number of "catastrophic" SEUs in several simple communications receivers by over 95%, thus increasing the mean time to failure (MTTF) by 25 to 99 times, while consuming less than half of the resources that TMR does in most cases.