Abstract
When electronic systems are working in radiation environments, transient errors, and permanent errors may occur. Static random-access memory (SRAM) has been the one of most significant parts in various semiconductor chips for its high performance and high logic density features. However, because of their dedicated electronic circuits, SRAMs are sensitive to radiation effects. In this article, a portable scheme combined with error correcting code (ECC) and refreshing techniques is proposed to correct errors and mitigate error accumulation in extreme radiation environments. Since the proposed scheme is small and transparent to other modules and no additional latency is introduced, it therefore can be easily applied to the system where the hardware modules are designed with fixed reading and writing latency. We evaluated this design by simulation in a hardware fault injection platform and radiation experiments in the neutron radiation facility. The results obtained in the neutron experiment, where the flux of neutron particles is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$5 \times {\rm 10^6\text{ cm}^2. \ s^{-1}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> , show that the number of bit-flips in 32 kB self-refresh ECC RAM on the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA remains zero, while the number of bit-flips in unhardened RAM rose to 32 in 1.5 h.
Highlights
T HE natural radiation environment consists of electrons, protons, and a very small fraction of heavier nuclei, which are trapped by Earth magnetic field or produced in solar events and cosmic rays [1]
To ensure that the RAM logic function will not change during execution, we adopted the idea of self-refresh error correcting code (ECC) RAM and double the system clock to make the injection controller operate at a higher frequency
The number of bit flips in self-refresh ECC RAM remains at zero during the entire experiment, while the number of bit flips in unhardened RAM rises to 32 in the initial 1.5 h. As both RAMs are working in the same radiation environment, it proves that the design of self-refresh ECC RAM is effective for SEU mitigation
Summary
T HE natural radiation environment consists of electrons, protons, and a very small fraction of heavier nuclei, which are trapped by Earth magnetic field or produced in solar events and cosmic rays [1]. The proposed system is designed to support the computer system in radiation environment, one of the common features of such systems is that the clock frequency of processor is relatively lower than normal system. We proposed a self-refresh RAM design by doubling the frequency of RAMs. In the proposed scheme, the scrubber requires no extra RAM access port in RAMs or modifications in user modules. The proposed design works just like a normal RAMs, it could be applied in various systems. Considering that bandwidth for scrubber is equal to the user module, the scrubber can scan RAMs with high rates, which provides better error mitigation performance in radiation environments. The proposed design can correct more than 99.97% of SEU’s errors at the SEU injection rate 6.25 × 104 bit/s.
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