Dynamic heavy ions SEE testing of NanoXplore radiation hardened SRAM-based FPGA: Reliability-performance analysis

Abstract

NanoXplore is the European pioneer vendor to develop ITAR-free radiation-hardened SRAM-based FPGAs. This work is the first to explore dynamic SEE tests in the NG-Medium FPGA device. The reliability-performance analysis of an embedded unmitigated design is performed under heavy ion-induced errors. Moreover, the improvements of additional user level fault-tolerance techniques, such as redundancy and scrubbing, are explored. The design sensitiveness is evaluated through dynamic cross section, mean fluence to failure, and empiric reliability. Results obtained demonstrate the best tradeoff between area, performance, and reliability is achieved combining full design redundancy, periodic scrubbing, arithmetic functions implemented in DSPs, logical resets between executions, and area-oriented application execution.