Fault tolerance for space applications

WG Chair: Antonis Paschalis (University of Athens – Greece)
WG Vice Chair: Pedro Reviriego Vasallo (University Antonio de Nebrija – Spain)

The objectives of Work Group 4 are:

1. Radiation induced faults and countermeasures
   Fault tolerant design techniques are widely used in the Space environment. The reasons why fault tolerance is so important in space applications lay both in the criticality and importance of the systems under design (the cost of a satellite can be in the order of a dozen of millions of euro) and in the presence, outside the terrestrial atmosphere of a wide range of radiation particles that can induce many different types of faults in digital integrated circuits. The study of the effects of radiation on nanoscale devices is therefore mandatory to evaluate how they will behave during a space mission
2. Cost effectiveness trade-off (Commercial vs RadHard)
   As stated before, the cost of a satellite, and in general of space missions, is very high. In order to reduce costs, without sacrifying reliability, trade-offs should be investigated between commercial and rad-hard chips. Commercial chips are cheaper but require suitable fault tolerant techniques to mitigate the radiation effects. Moreover they require to be validated before their use in space. On the other hand, rad-hard components are realized with suitable manufacturing processes (e.g. silicon on insulator) that are very expensive, but assure high resilience with respect to radiation-induced faults.