Ultra Long-life Avionics Architecture

For survival and achieving reliability in ultra longlife missions, fault tolerant design techniques need to handle the predominant failure mode, which is the wear-out of components. Conventional design methodologies will need excessive redundancy to achieve the required reliability. The objective of this paper is to present a new approach to design a more efficient fault-tolerant avionics system architecture that requires significantly fewer redundant components. This architecture uses generic h c t i o n blocks that can be programmed, in-flight, to replace a wide variety of components. Effectively, each individual generic block is almost equivalent to an entire redundant string of components used in conventional approach. As a result, the ultra long-life system can achieve much higher level of reliability while carrying far fewer components. Due to the programmable nature of generic redundant blocks, the physical location of a specific component is not pre-determined and accordingly, wireless interconnection is employed to provide the necessary flexibility in connectivity. A testbed of this architecture is being developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.