A dynamic partial reconfiguration design flow for permanent faults mitigation in FPGAs

Abstract

Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) has been used as a solution to deal with permanent faults in space-borne based on off-the-shelf Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices when they are exposed to the radiation environment. Mechanisms based on DPR must detect the permanent fault in a module and perform the reconfiguration process. A major issue is the amount of silicon resources reserved for that, as the design methodology employed so far requires different partial implementations for the same module. This work proposes a design flow and describes a mechanism to deal with permanent faults, in which the amount of Reconfigurable Partitions (RPs) is reduced, resulting in a better usage of silicon resources available in an FPGA.