Engineering hardware and software fault-tolerance techniques to protect memory and logic gates against cosmic ray strikes.
At cruising altitudes (35,000 to 50,000 feet), atmospheric neutron radiation is several hundred times more intense than at sea level. High-energy neutrons collide with silicon atoms, flipping bits in RAM registers (Single-Event Upsets).
AvionicsNodes incorporates dual-bit detection and single-bit correction ECC across all on-chip SRAM and external DDR memory, complemented by Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) in FPGA logic blocks.
Hardware DMA engines continuously sweep through physical memory, identifying and correcting flipped bits before multiple errors accumulate in safety-critical flight control variables.