A Fault-Tolerant Interconnect Mechanism for NMR Nanoarchitectures

Abstract

Redundancy techniques, such as N -tuple modular redundancy (NMR), has been widely used to correct faulty behavior of components and achieve high reliability. Almost all redundancy-based strategies rely on a majority voting. The voter, therefore, becomes a critical unit for the correct operation of any NMR system. In this paper, we propose a voterless fault-tolerant strategy to implement a robust NMR system design. We show that using a novel fault-tolerant communication mechanism, namely logic code division multiple access, we can transfer data with extremely low error rates among N modules and completely eliminate the need for a centralized voter unit. Such a highly reliable strategy is vital for future nanosystems in which high defect rate is expected. Experimental results are also reported to verify the concept, clarify the design procedure, and measure the system's reliability.