Engineering
Fault-Tolerant Design of a Microprocessor Using Triple Modular Redundancy
Quick fact
Triple modular redundancy (TMR) is a fault-tolerant design technique that uses three identical processors and a majority voter to mask faults. If one processor produces an incorrect result, the other two agree on the correct output, so the system continues operating correctly without any downtime.
Why this is interesting
Have you ever wondered how airplanes and spacecraft keep flying even when their onboard computers face hardware failures? In such systems, a single electronic failure cannot be allowed to cause a crash, and so designers use a clever trick: they replicate the entire computer three times and let a vote decide what to do.