Performance improvement of fault-tolerant systems through chip-level current monitoring

International audience ; In this paper we describe an approach to perform on-line detection of faults induced by ionizing radiation at the system level. In this approach, the leakage current induced by this type of faults can be detected in an early stage of the failure development (i.e. before they cause functional errors or system power-supply breakdown). This ability allows the implementation of fail safe and fault tolerant reconfigurable systems having higher levels of safety and larger lifetime with respect to systems based on conventional techniques. We also describes in this work the implementation and present computer simulation results of a board that will be used to validate the proposed approach. This board contains functional logic monitored by a current sensor, and it will be characterized to radiation during laboratory tests.