Fault Tolerant Dynamic Reconfigurable Device Based on EDAC with Rollback

Abstract

Reconfigurable devices are expected to be utilized in such mission-critical fields as space development and undersea cables, because system updates and pseudo-repair can be achieved remotely by reconfiguring. However, conventional reconfigurable devices suffer from memory-bit upset caused by charged particles in space which results in fatal system problems. In this paper, we propose an architecture of a fault-tolerant reconfigurable device. The proposed device is divided into cells with embedded control circuits. The autonomous-repair cell proposed in this paper is based on error detection and correction (EDAC) and uses hardware and time redundancy. From evaluation, it is shown that the proposed architecture achieves sufficient reliability against configuration memory upset. Trade-offs between performance and cost are also analyzed.