IMPROVING THE RELIABILITY OF DIGITAL SYSTEMS BY REDUNDANCY AND RESTORING ORGANS,
Abstract
The use of redundant circuits and restoring organs as a technique for improving the reliability of digital systems has been evaluated, and guidelins for a near-optimum use of this technique in practical systems have been established. Two types of restoring organs, majority vote takers and simple adaptive vote takers, have been considered. A series of nomograms was developed for determining the optimum trade-off between the number of redundant circuits and the number of vote takers to be used in any given situation, and for determining the resulting increase in system reliability. Several conventional measures of reliability were considered. It is shown that the proper use of redundancy and restoring organs can be a highly efficient technique for increasing the useful life of a system, particularly when the acceptable probability of failure must be very small. In contrast, the efficiency of this technique with respect to increasing the mean time between system failures is quite modest. In general, the efficiency of this technique will be largest in the case of large systems. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 01, 1964
- Accession Number
- AD0449371
Entities
People
- J. K. Knox-seith
Organizations
- Stanford University