Radiation Hardened Digital Direct Synthesizer With CORDIC for Spaceborne Applications Articles uri icon

publication date

  • May 2020

start page

  • 83167

end page

  • 83176

volume

  • 8

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 2169-3536

abstract

  • The Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer algorithm (CORDIC) is a simple mechanism to
    compute a set of elementary functions, such as trigonometric functions, using fixed-point devices.
    It is widely adopted, also in applications running in harsh environments such as space, where radiation is
    a cause of errors in nanoelectronic devices. A single event upset in a configuration bit of a Field Programmable Gate
    Array (FPGA) can completely change the behavior of the implemented circuit, so it is important to detect and
    reconfigure the FPGA when this happens. Dual modular redundancy is the typical method to detect errors in
    electronic circuits, but it has an important overhead in area and power consumption and it does not provide
    any additional functionality apart from the activation of the FPGA reconfiguration trigger in presence of
    error. This paper presents two ad-hoc techniques to protect the Digital Direct Synthesizer with CORDIC
    when it is implemented into an FPGA, with limited overhead in terms of area and power consumption when
    compared with the traditional solution. The first solution slightly increases the percentage of undetected
    errors, about 11%, reducing to almost half the area overhead of the circuit. The second solution introduces
    a trade-off between the percentage of error detection and the precision of the trigonometric output of the
    CORDIC by means of a polymorphic structure with lower area resources than the existing solutions. This
    last proposal allows the system to increase the precision of the digital synthesis signal under absence of
    errors or to activate the error protection in scenarios with external disturbances such as radiation.

subjects

  • Telecommunications

keywords

  • cordic; digital signal processing; dual modular redundancy; fault tolerance; radiation