Effective Mitigation of Radiation-induced Single Event Transient on Flash-based FPGAs

Abstract

Due to the decreasing feature sizes of VLSI circuits, radiation induced Single Event Transients (SETs) are increasingly dominating the event ratio on modern VLSI devices. In particular, Flash-based FPGAs are characterized by the main concern of radiation-induced voltage glitches or SETs in the combinational logic. Transient pulses can be sampled by a storage element and can propagate through the circuit up to the outputs and leading to an error. In this paper, we propose a complete implementation flow including sensitivity analysis, fault tolerant mapping and fault tolerance-oriented place and route for the effective design of SET tolerant circuits on Flash-based FPGAs. In details, the proposed method allows accurate measurement of the transient pulse source induced by radiation particles and estimation of the SET error rate on the overall circuit. Besides the developed method provides a netlist mapping and place and route tool for the selective mitigation of SET effects. The proposed method has been applied to an industrial design oriented to the Euclid European Space Agency mission including more than ten different modules. The obtained results show an improvement of the total filtering capability of around 43 times with respect to the original netlist without affecting the timing constraints of the circuit.