Analysis of radiation-induced SEUs on dynamic reconfigurable systems

Abstract

SRAM-Based FPGAs are widely employed in space and avionics computing. The unfriendly environment and FPGA radiation sensibility can have dramatic drawbacks on the application reliability. The partial self-reconfiguration ability gives an excellent aid to counteract single event upsets (SEUs) caused by excessive silicon ionization, and the consequent system misbehavior. Related to this feature, fault injection and fault emulation and configuration scrubbing, has been carried out over three versions of a reconfigurable Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) system: a single FFT, a single larger FFT and a FFT with TMR architecture. The analysis has been focused on multiple injected SEUs scenario, considering the availability problem in a real-time application and highlighting the circuit tolerance at the upset presence. This operation has the goal to emulate as much as possible a real radiation test avoiding all the handicaps that this procedure involves. The obtained results have shown the advantages of the configuration scrubbing performed with the aim to fix multiple upsets, achieving up to 13.6% of circuit hardening. The achieved conclusions are an interesting starting point for the study of fault mitigation techniques through the use of reconfiguration. The projects have been tested on a Z-7010 AP SoC.