Emulating Radiation-Induced Multicell Upset Patterns in SRAM FPGAs With Fault Injection

Abstract

Radiation-induced multiple-cell upsets (MCUs) are events that account for more than 50% of failures on triple modular redundancy (TMR) designs in SRAM field programmable gate array (FPGA). It is important to understand these events and their impact on FPGA designs to develop improved fault mitigation techniques. This article describes an enhanced fault injection (FI) method for SRAM-based FPGAs that injects MCUs within the configuration memory of an FPGA based on MCU information extracted from previous radiation tests. The improved FI technique uncovers 3× more failures than is observable in conventional single-bit FI approaches. The results from several MCU FI experiments also show that injecting MCUs can replicate the failures observed in the radiation beam test and identify new failure mechanisms.