A New Domains-based Isolation Design Flow for Reconfigurable SoCs

Abstract

Reconfigurable SoCs are widely adopted in mission-critical tasks in aerospace and automotive. Though, one of their main drawbacks is the susceptibility to high-energy particles both in space and at sea level. Isolation Design Flow is a promising implementation approach to improve the reliability of circuits. However, considering the high number of modules in a complex circuit, especially when redundant techniques are applied, IDF requires a complex floorplanning stage. In this paper, the benefits of using IDF are evaluated, both for plain and hardened-by-redundancy designs. We propose an implementation methodology to tackle the complexity of applying IDF to TMR-based circuits that usually make the implementation approach unfeasible. The impact of different design policies on the reliability of the system is evaluated through fault injection campaigns. The proposed method is applied to the TMR-hardened CORDIC core implemented on Zynq AP-SoC and compared with other possible solutions. The results report a significant improvement in the TMR effectiveness when the proposed domains-based IDF is applied.