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In this page, information about the research activity of the group is provided.
In particular, the development work on the Europen Space Agency SST tool can be found.
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Research on Circuits Design for Radiation Environments
The main idea behind our research is to protect digital circuits against the effects of radiation.
One of the main effects in the Space environment is Single Event Upsets (SEUs), that may flip
the value of storage elements, for example flip-flops. To deal with SEUs, Triple
Modular Redundancy (TMR) is normally used. This technique replaces each flip-flop
with a group of three and some voting logic, so that the wrong behavior can be corrected. Although
it is simple and general, TMR comes at a high cost in terms of circuit area and
power consumption. In this project, we plan to examine the effects of SEUs at a
higher level of abstraction. For example, in a communication system a single error
in the datapath of the reception channel can be acceptable if we are still within
the Bit Error Rate (BER) specifications. Similarly, in a circuit that is doing measurement
of some physical signal continuously, it can be acceptable to just detect SEUs and
drop the measurement in which the error occurs if SEUs are unlikely for any given
measurement interval. Another way to exploit higher levels of abstraction is to
use the structure of certain circuit implementations to deal with SEUs. One example
is Signal Processing Circuits (like Digital Filters and Fast Fourier Transforms).
This approach can result in more efficient circuit implementations in terms of area
and power while maintaining the protection against SEUs.
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To be able to develop the previous ideas, we need a platform that allows introducing
SEUs in digital circuits and evaluate their effects. Given that we will experiment
with different circuits and assess a number of techniques,
the ideal solution should be flexible and allow quick evaluation of circuits. We
plan to use the SEUs Simulation Tool (SST) developed at ESA which will be enhanced
during this project.
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