Experimental Validation of a Tool for Predicting the Effects of Soft Errors in SRAM-Based FPGAs

Abstract

Estimating the impact of single event effects (SEEs) on SRAM-based FPGA devices is a major issue in order to adopt them in radiation environments such as space or high altitude. Among the available approaches, we proposed an analytical method to predict SEE effects based on the analysis of the circuit the FPGA implements, which does not require either simulation or fault injection. In this paper we provide an experimental validation of this approach, by comparing the results it provides with those coming from accelerated testing. We adopted our analytical method for computing the error cross section of a design implemented on SRAM-based FPGA devices. We then compared the obtained figure with that obtained by accelerated testing. Experimental analysis demonstrated that accelerated testing closely match the figures the analytical method provides.