Multiple Fault Injection Platform for SRAM-Based FPGA Based on Ground-Level Radiation Experiments

Abstract

SRAM-based FPGAs are attractive to many high reliable applications at ground level due to its high density and configurability. However, due to its high sensitivity to neutroninduced soft errors, the FPGA configuration memory bits may suffer unexpected bit-flips and consequently critical errors may occur. To cope with this problem, authors have proposed several mitigation techniques, which must be verified under the presence of faults. Since ground-level radiation experiments are very costly, fault injection is a suitable method to verify mitigation techniques in early stages of development. In this work, we present a fault injector platform implemented in a FPGA commercial board able to inject multiple bit-flips in the configuration memory bits of SRAM-based FPGAs based on a fault database collected on radiation experiments. We show the accuracy of our proposed fault injection campaign compared to radiation test results. We compare the soft error rate of three designs under the accumulation of multiple faults.