Evaluating the Impact of Repetition, Redundancy, Scrubbing, and Partitioning on 28-nm FPGA Reliability Through Neutron Testing

Abstract

SRAM-based field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are widely deployed in space and high-radiation environments, but they exhibit vulnerability to radiation effects. Designs can be hardened against radiation effects with design-side countermeasures such as redundancy, scrubbing, and partitioning. Through neutron tests, we investigate the impact of these design-side countermeasures on 28-nm FPGAs. We specifically address not only the provided radiation hardness but also the resource utilization and performance overheads. In addition, we evaluate the efficacy of repeating the operation after error detection. The results show that using coarse-grained and fine-grained triple modular redundancy (TMR) over dual modular redundancy (DMR) improves the failure cross section by $3.29\times $ and $11.49\times $ , respectively. The partitioning scheme that we used does not show a significant effect on radiation hardness. Using an internal scrubber and repeating the operation after a failure further decreases DMR, coarse-grained TMR, and fine-grained TMR cross sections by $5.10\times $ , $1.85\times $ , and $1.18\times $ , respectively.