A New Protection Technique for Finite Impulse Response (FIR) Filters in the Presence of Soft Errors

Traditional techniques to protect digital circuits against soft errors normally result in a significant area and power overhead. Some of those techniques may also reduce the maximum frequency of operation of the circuit as they introduce additional delays in the critical paths. In this paper we propose a circuit specific technique to protect digital finite impulse response (FIR) filters from soft errors. The idea behind our approach is to use the knowledge of the structure of those filters to provide effective protection against soft errors with lower area and power overhead than that of traditional techniques, like triple modular redundancy (TMR) and error detection and correction (EDAC). The whole study will be focused on Space applications, since the problem of radiation is a key issue, using a soft error simulation platform implemented by the European Space Agency.