Sift-Out Modular Redundancy

A fault-tolerance technique for digital systems, Sift-Out Modular Redundancy, is proposed and designed. An appropriate number of identical channels are provided for each module. The number of channels depend upon the particular application, and all channels are active as long as they are fault-free. Upon the failure of a channel, its contribution to the module output ceases. The configuration tolerates up to L − 2 channel failures, if L is the initial number of channels. Sift-out redundancy is easy to implement, and shows several advantages when compared to existing redundancy techniques.