Reliability improvement of microprocessor system

Abstract

General concept of reliability and useful criteria for the realtime systems are described. Various techniques to improve the reliability of a microprocessor system are investigated and an experimental highly reliable self-diagnosable microprocessor system is suggested. In the system, modular architecture is taken. By using TMR in the memory module, the reliability of the memory module, which is the most unreliable part of the system, can be matched to the rest of the system and the reliability of the whole system can be optimized. To make the system self-diagnosable and the diagnosis automatic, stand-by redundancy with a switching network is employed in the processing unit. In the system, mission time improvement factor of about 3 is obtained.