Highly reliable analog filter design using analog voting

Abstract

N-Modular Redundancy (NMR) is the most commonly used failure mitigation technique, in which a voting unit is used to vote out the wrong path/data. The voter is, therefore, vital for nanoscale analog and digital circuits in which high defect rate is expected. In this paper, we propose a redundancy based fault-tolerant methodology to design fault tolerant analog filters. The key contribution of our work is an innovative mean voter which is very fast, inexpensive and linearly scalable with respect to the redundancy factor. For the proof of concept, we designed a 4th order high frequency Gm-C filter and a 5th order Opamp-RC filter and reported the circuits reliability.