HIGH RELIABILITY SYSTEM EMPLOYING SUBELEMENT REDUNDANCY

A highly reliable system redundancy concept is disclosed wherein the system is divided into a number of substantially identical subelements wherein spare ones of the subelements may be substituted for failed ones of the subelements. The subelements and their corresponding loads are connected in a predetermined sequence. When one of the normally functioning subelements fails, the subelements following it in the sequence are disconnected from their corresponding loads then reconnected to the next load in the sequence. The last load in the sequence is reconnected to a spare subelement. The concept may be applied in numerous applications such as in defect tolerant computer memories, arithmetic data processing units, or in communications channel applications.