Fault-tolerant A/D converter using analogue voting

Analogue and digital circuits are both prone to failure because of device degradations, transient upsets and large parametric variations. Redundancy techniques, such as N-tuple modular redundancy, have been widely used to correct faulty behaviour of components and achieve high reliability for digital circuits. In this study, the authors propose a redundancy based fault-tolerant methodology for analogue circuits. In particular, the authors focus on highly reliable analogue-to-digital converter, which is a critical component in many mixed-signal systems. The authors methodology employs redundant analogue blocks and chooses the best result using an innovative analogue voter. Simulation results are reported to verify the concepts, measure the system´s reliability and trade off reliability against cost and power.