A Practical Circuit for Integral Majority-Voting Logic Elements

As an introduction, the paper shows that for spacecraft systems to be designed for the next generation of scientific missions, the system complexity and long life requirements produce reliability criteria which can not be met by either current satellite logic circuitry nor application of redundant sets of such circuitry.

The paper then describes a circuit composed of available integrated circuits along with a passive voter circuit and providing majority voting at the logic element level. This circuit is analyzed both from reliability and performance standpoints to show that approximately two to three orders of magnitude improvement in reliability without any significant degradation in performance is realizable.