Techniques to Enable FPGA Based Reconfigurable Fault Tolerant Space Computing

Abstract

Reconfigurable computing using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) offer significant performance improvements over traditional space based processing solutions. The application of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGA processing components requires radiation-effect detection and mitigation strategy to compensate for the FPGAs' susceptibility to single event upsets (SEUs) and single event functional interrupts (SEFIs). A reconfigurable computing architecture that uses external triple modular redundancy (TMR) via a radiation-hardened ASIC provides the most robust approach to SEU and SEFI detection and mitigation. Honeywell has designed a TMR Voter ASIC with an integrated FPGA configuration manager that can automatically reconfigure an upset FPGA upon TMR error detection. The automatic configuration manager also has features to support resynchronizing the upset FPGA with the remaining two FPGAs operating in a self checking pair (SCP) mode. Automating and minimizing reconfiguration times and re synchronization times enables high performance FPGA-based processors to provide high system availability with minimal software/system controller intervention.