Redundancy -- A Space Age Rainbow

Redundancy as a design tool is becoming more necessary with increased space age reliability requirements and more practical with continued development of micro-miniaturized hardware. Blind use of classical relationships without a thorough knowledge of all interactions can result in calculated improvement that is never attained. Redundancy, incorrectly applied, can reduce reliability. In this paper, the most common errors in the application of redundancy to designs are presented and methods of optimizing the benefits of redundancy and of avoiding the pitfalls are explored. Included are practical design techniques to reduce interdependency in the application of redundant items. Improved techniques are presented for more accurately predicting the reliability of redundant designs.