Fault-tolerance Techniques for ATC Systems Used in High-speed Railway to Prevent Geomagnetic Storm’s Effects

FPGA has found an increasingly wide utilization in automatic train control (ATC) equipment used in highspeed rail systems, which is potentially sensitive to radiation. How the space radiation caused by Geomagnetic storm affects FPGA devices was analyzed. This paper investigated the FPGA fault-tolerance techniques used nowadays and presented a new mitigation technique against upsets, duplication with comparison combined with time redundancy. A comparison between the main characteristics of several implemented versions of the case circuit was reported. The results show that the minimum partitioning dual modular redundancy design, with the upset detector and voter circuit no radiation-hardened, has 12.3% sensitive areas. If the upset detector and voter circuit is tripled, the radiation sensitive areas will be 0%. This methodology may not only reduce area and pin counts and consequently power dissipation in the I/O pads, the main drawbacks of the triple modular redundancy (TMR) approach, but also look interesting to mitigate the radiation effect produced by geomagnetic storm.