A new low-cost non intrusive platform for injecting soft errors in SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming more and more popular among aerospace devices. Radiation effects have to be investigated in order to measure the fault tolerance degree of the applications and to validate new mitigation techniques. Fault injection is one of the possible evaluation methods. Several platforms have been developed in the past years in order to inject soft errors within FPGAs, however they have their greater drawbacks in intrusiveness and high-costs. In this paper we propose a new, low-cost and not-intrusive, fault injection platform to emulate soft errors within the configuration memory of SRAM-based FPGAs. In particular, radiation effects can be evaluated without modifying neither the circuit implemented in the FPGA nor the application it executes, thus allowing to study the real system that will take part to the mission. Experimental results on several test circuits are reported and commented, demonstrating the feasibility of the presented approach.