doi: 10.7873/DATE.2015.0024


An Approximate Voting Scheme for Reliable Computing


Ke Chen1,a, Fabrizio Lombardi1,b and Jie Han2

1Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA.

achen.ke1@husky.neu.edu
blombardi@ece.neu.edu

2Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

jhan8@ualberta.ca

ABSTRACT

This paper relies on the principles of inexact computing to alleviate the issues arising in static masking by voting for reliable computing. A scheme that utilizes approximate voting is proposed; it is referred to as inexact double modular redundancy (IDMR). IDMR does not resort to triplication, thus saving overhead due to modular replication; moreover, this scheme is adaptive in its operation, i.e., it allows a threshold to determine the validity of the module outputs. IDMR operates by initially establishing the difference between the values of the outputs of the two modules; only if the difference is below a preset threshold, then the voter calculates the average value of the two module outputs. An extensive analysis of the voting circuits and an application to image processing are presented.

Keywords: Approximate computing, Reliable system, Modular redundancy, Voting.



Full Text (PDF)