Design of a Simple Reliable Voter for Modular Redundancy Implementations

This article deals with modeling and design of a new fault-tolerant voter circuit. Majority voted redundancy is increasingly implemented in fault-tolerant design today. A voter is used in these implementations to determine a possibly correct result through the majority vote. The reliability of the voter circuit should be much higher than that of the other circuit elements; otherwise it will wipe out the gains of the redundancy scheme. Since almost all the circuit elements are fabricated with the same technology, the voter circuit itself needs to be fault-tolerant. In this paper, we present a novel fault-tolerant voter circuit design with a simple structure, so that it can easily be used for N-modular redundancy implementations as well as for systems with more than a single bit output.