SEU mitigation exploratory tests in a ITER related FPGA

Abstract

Data acquisition hardware of ITER diagnostics if located in the port cells of the tokamak, as an example, will be irradiated with neutrons during the fusion reactor operation. Due to this reason the majority of the hardware containing Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) will be placed after the ITER bio-shield, such as the cubicles instrumentation room. Nevertheless, it is worth to explore real-time mitigation of soft-errors caused by neutrons radiation in ITER related FPGAs. A Virtex-6 FPGA from Xilinx (XC6VLX365T-1FFG1156C) is used on the ATCA-IO-PROCESSOR board, included in the ITER Catalog of Instrumentation & Control (I & C) products – Fast Controllers. The Virtex-6 is a re-programmable logic device where the configuration is stored in Static RAM (SRAM), the functional data is stored in dedicated Block RAM (BRAM) and the functional state logic in Flip-Flops. Single Event Upsets (SEU) due to the ionizing radiation of neutrons cause soft errors, unintended changes (bit-flips) of the logic values stored in the state elements of the FPGA. Real-time SEU monitoring and soft errors repairing, when possible, were explored in this work. An FPGA built-in Soft Error Mitigation (SEM) controller detects and corrects soft errors in the FPGA Configuration Memory (CM). BRAM based SEU sensors with Error Correction Code (ECC) detect and repair the respective BRAM contents. Real-time mitigation of SEU can increase reliability and availability of data acquisition hardware for nuclear applications. The results of the tests performed using the SEM controller and the SEU sensors are presented for a Virtex-6 FPGA (XC6VLX240T-1FFG1156C) when irradiated with neutrons from the Portuguese Research Reactor (RPI), a 1MW nuclear fission reactor, operated by IST in the neighborhood of Lisbon. Results show that the proposed SEU mitigation technique is able to repair the majority of the detected SEU soft-errors in the FPGA memory.