The ARGOS project

Radiation, such as alpha particles and cosmic rays, can cause transient faults in electronic systems. Such faults cause errors called single-event upsets (SEUs). SEUs are a major source of errors in electronics used in space applications. There is also a growing concern about SEUs at ground level for deep submicron technologies. Radiation hardening is an effective yet costly solution to this problem. Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components have been considered as a low-cost alternative to radiation-hardened parts. In ARGOS project, these two approaches were compared in an actual space experiment. We assessed the effectiveness of software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) techniques in enhancing the reliability of COTS.