Corrective control for transient faults with application to configuration controllers

A novel design methodology of corrective control is proposed for fault-tolerance against transient faults in input/output asynchronous sequential machines. The main objective is to lessen controller complexity by proposing a structure of corrective control that employs no state observer, which is required in the former studies for input/output control of asynchronous machines. The form of the output feedback is also simplified as a unit character instead of bursts. Although the exact identification of the machine´s state is infeasible, the proposed controller achieves immediate fault-tolerance against transient faults that cause unauthorised state transitions. As a case study, the authors apply the proposed control scheme to implementing configuration controllers for space-borne field programmable gate array with hardware redundancy in which single event upset faults may happen by the radiation effect.