New Protection Technique Against Unidirectional MEUs for FIR Filters

Abstract

As technology shrinks, multiple bits upsets (MBUs) are becoming an important problem in the reliability of digital designs exposed to radiation effects. In this paper, a new technique for the implementation of finite impulse response (FIR) filters is presented that provides protection against single and multi-unidirectional bit upsets (SEUs and MBUs), which have a lower circuit complexity and cost than traditional techniques like N-modular redundancy. Most of previous works has focused on single event upset (SEU), however, in this paper, a coding method based on Berger codes are presented and implemented on FPGA-based FIR filter. As the Berger coding covers all unidirectional faults, the MBUs are also handled in the proposed schemes. The effectiveness of the proposed technique has been evaluated using a dynamic partial reconfiguration-based fault injection platform. The implementation results of the proposed mitigation technique in comparison with traditional TMR method and previous mitigation techniques in the literature represent the effectiveness in terms of protection and implementation cost.