Abstract
Communication systems that work in jeopardized environments such as space are affected by soft errors that can cause malfunctions in the behavior of the circuits such as, for example, single event upsets (SEUs) or multiple bit upsets (MBUs). In order to avoid this erroneous functioning, this kind of systems are usually protected using redundant logic such as triple modular redundancy (TMR) or error correction codes (ECCs). After the implementation of the protected modules, the communication modules must be tested to assess the achieved reliability. These tests could be driven into accelerator facilities through ionization processes or they can be performed using fault injection tools based on software simulation such as the SEUs simulation tool (SST), or based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation like the one described in this work. In this paper, a tutorial for the setup of a fault injection emulation platform based on the Xilinx soft error mitigation (SEM) intellectual property (IP) controller is depicted step by step, showing a complete cycle. To illustrate this procedure, an online repository with a complete project and a step-by-step guide is provided, using as device under test a classical communication component such as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter. Finally, the integration of the automatic configuration memory error-injection (ACME) tool to speed up the fault injection process is explained in detail at the end of the paper.
Highlights
The reliability feature for communication systems that must work in harsh environments such as space or radioactively contaminated areas, is a major concern nowadays [1,2]
Area, delay and power consumption play an important role in the design process, and fault tolerance is mandatory in order to deal with soft errors such as single event upsets (SEUs), multiple bit upsets (MBUs) or single event functional interrupt (SEFIs) produced by radiation [3]
The just one error can totally modify the receiver operation mode and with this, the electromagnetic spectrum of the received signal
Summary
The reliability feature for communication systems that must work in harsh environments such as space or radioactively contaminated areas, is a major concern nowadays [1,2] For these scenarios, area, delay and power consumption play an important role in the design process, and fault tolerance is mandatory in order to deal with soft errors such as single event upsets (SEUs), multiple bit upsets (MBUs) or single event functional interrupt (SEFIs) produced by radiation [3]. In order to improve this workflow, the use and integration of the automatic configuration memory error-injection tool (ACME) [13] is introduced This tool and the whole framework described here, despite others such as the Fault Injection Intel® FPGA IP Core [14], are totally open and free to be used by designers, providing the same amount of information and accuracy without requiring to purchase of a separate license.
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