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doi: 10.3850/978-3-9815370-4-8_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.
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