Error sensitivity study of FFT architectures implemented in FPGA

Abstract

This work studies the impact that the architectural choices can have in the error mitigation of a digital processing module such as the Fast Fourier Transform. To this purpose, several serial and pipelined architectures were implemented in FPGA using Block Triple Modular Redundancy and analysed under a fault injection approach that was previously validated with radiation. These architectures were compared with respect to error rate, common mode failure rate and signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental results show that the error rate is strongly correlated with the use of resources when using a similar architecture. However, pipelined architectures tend to have more common mode failures but with lower signal-to-noise ratio than a serial architecture.