Fault tolerance through redundant COTS components for satellite processing applications

Satellites and other space systems typically employ rare and expensive radiation tolerant, radiation hardened or at least military qualified parts for computational and other subsystems to ensure reliability in the harsh environment of space. In this paper, a parallel architecture is proposed that allows commercial devices to be incorporated into a computational unit with aggregate reliability figures approaching that of space-qualified alternatives. Apart from the common argument of cost, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices are attractive due to their relatively low power consumption and high processing performance. This paper describes a COTS-based processing architecture for space-borne computers and compares its reliability to a common alternative radiation hardened configuration.