Mitigation and Experiment on Neutron Induced Single-Event Upsets in SRAM-Based FPGAs

Abstract

In order to study the Neutron induced single-event upsets (SEU) in SRAM-based FPGAs (SFPGAs), experiments have been conducted for validating its sensitivity. To increase the reliability of SFPGA designs in the presence of Neutron induced SEU, an analytical approach based on probabilistic transfer matrix (PTM) is introduced to estimate the relative reliability of designs mapped into SFPGAs. Moreover, the proposed method is able to obtain the error sensitivity rating of basic nodes in SFPGAs. Software is designed to implement the mitigation method. Results of neutron radiation experiment on a digital filter circuit design illustrate that impact induced by the neutron cannot be ignored, and partial triple modular redundancy (TMR) on the sensitive sub-circuits indicated by the proposed analysis method is effective for SEU mitigation with less area overhead than that of full TMR.