Fault-Tolerant Systems in a Space Environment: The CRC ARGOS project

This report describes the ARGOS project at Stanford CRC. The primary goals of this project are to collect data on the errors that occur in digital integrated circuits in a space environment, to determine the tradeoffs between fault-avoidance and fault-tolerance, and to see if radiation hardening can be avoided by using fault tolerance techniques. Our experiments will be carried out on two processor boards on the ARGOS experimental satellite. One of the boards uses radiation-hardened components while the other uses only commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) parts. Programs and data can be uploaded to the boards during the mission. This capability allows us to evaluate different software fault-tolerance techniques. This report reviews various error detection techniques. Software techniques that do not require any special hardware are discussed. The framework of the software that we are developing for error data collection is presented