A fault detection and self-recovery system for space-borne dual ring counters

This paper proposes a novel scheme of fault detection and self-recovery for space-borne dual ring counters subject to transient faults. The considered ring counter is equipped with hardware redundancy, but it has a limited output domain where direct access to the current state is unavailable. We employ the theory of corrective control to detect any transient fault occurring to the counter bits and to realize immediate self-recovery of the ring counter back to the normal state. The structure of the fault-tolerant controller is designed to be minimal regardless of the counter size. To validate the applicability, we implement the proposed system on a commercial FGPA board.