Abstract
The effects of ionizing radiation on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have been investigated in depth during the last decades. The impact of these effects is typically evaluated on implementations which have a deterministic behavior. In this article, two well-known true-random number generators (TRNGs) based on sampling jittery signals have been exposed to a Co-60 radiation source as in the standard tests for space conditions. The effects of the accumulated dose on these TRNGs, an in particular, its repercussion over their randomness quality (e.g., entropy or linear complexity), have been evaluated by using two National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) statistical test suites. The obtained results clearly show how the degradation of the statistical properties of these TRNGs increases with the accumulated dose. It is also notable that the deterioration of the TRNG (non-deterministic component) appears before that the degradation of the deterministic elements in the FPGA, which compromises the integrated circuit lifetime.
Highlights
Pico-satellite constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) have become a popular platform that allows earth observation, weather forecasting, space research and communications, among other applications
The first communication error appeared at 38.1 krad(Si) (83.1 mA) and the final valid bit-stream was captured at 40.8 krad(Si) (83.2 mA). These results are in line with those reported in [24] where some Igloo field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) were irradiated at room temperature using JPL’s Co-60 source
This condition can be found in LEO where many pico-satellites that use FPGAs among other components are deployed
Summary
Pico-satellite constellations in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) have become a popular platform that allows earth observation, weather forecasting, space research and communications, among other applications. The key generation typically relies on True Random Number Generators (TRNG) integrated into pico-satellites [2]. Due to their low-cost nature, TRNGs are embedded in some of the COTS avoiding expensive ad-hoc solutions. Several TRNGs approximations presented in the literature fit this low-cost requirement Special attention deserves those TRNGs that can be straightforwardly implemented on FPGAs such as [3,4]. The radiation-safe operating range of the entire system will be determined by the TRNGs. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides some background on TRNGs, statistical tests and typical effects of TID on Flash-FPGAs. Section 3 describes the experimental set-up.
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