Highly reliable A/D converter using analog voting

Abstract

Analog and digital circuits are both prone to failure due to transient upsets, variations, etc. Redundancy techniques, such as N-tuple Modular Redundancy, has been widely used to correct faulty behavior of components and achieve high reliability for digital circuits, whereas, not much has been done on the analog side. In this paper, we propose a redundancy based fault-tolerant methodology to design a highly reliable analog to digital converters (ADC). Our methodology employs redundant analog blocks and chooses the best result using an innovative analog voter. Experimental results are reported to verify the concepts, measure the systempsilas reliability and tradeoff reliability versus cost and power.