Industry standards including DO-254, IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 define functional safety and error mitigation strategies for the creation and validation of high reliability systems. The Synplify Premier tool automates industry methods for mitigating soft errors such as single-event upsets (SEUs) that are increasingly present in the latest FPGA process geometries. Synplify Premier provides...
SRAM-based FPGAs have permeated the space sector for multiple data processing applications. FPGA vendors provide this market with devices with different levels of radiation tolerance. While devices must be chosen with enough manufacturer-provided fault tolerance for each specific mission, occasionally users may want to add extra application-specific fault tolerance mechanisms, in order to...
Nowadays, SRAM-based FPGAs are becoming a common choice for space applications due to their main features such as reconfigurability, low costs and high-performance. However, SRAM-based FPGAs are also sensitive to several effects caused by ionizing radiations which leads to misbehavior of these devices. Therefore, a pre-deployment analysis and tackle of the effects caused by radiation-induced...
A set of CAD tools to elaborate and analyze the netlist generated by the NXmap tool is presented. In this presentation we will focus on the development of two tools: a static-analyzer of the post-layout netlist generated by NXmap and oriented to the analysis of Soft-Errors into NG-Medium FPGA and PySETA, a tool for the analysis and propagation of Single Event Transients into the circuit...
This talk will describe new extensions for the ESA LEON2FT IP core. The first part will present four new technology mapping targets that were added to the package - Xilinx Spartan 6, Virtex 7, MicroSemi PolarFire and NanoXplore NG-Medium. The second part will outline new arithmetic extensions for LEON2FT: a new modular FPU that supports arbitrary precision and packed formats, and new integer...
Abstract: For critical space-applications, single event upset (SEU) data are gathered to determine if the mission’s survivability requirements are satisfied. When performing failure analysis on a mission’s FPGA applications, it is common practice to use simple test structures that focus on the FPGA’s discrete internal components. It is also common practice that SEU parameters obtained from...
Aerospace and Avionics ICs reliability depends on their ability to withstand the effects of radiation that naturally occurs in space and the Earth’s atmosphere. Radiation can cause Single Event Upsets (SEUs) and other types of faulty behavior in the design elements, which is transient by nature (recovery is possible). ICs are also susceptible to silicon aging effect, which may result in...
Modern programmable SoCs, such as the Xilinx Zynq-7000 APSoC FPGAs, provide an attractive COTS platform for building high-performance, miniaturized systems in space avionics. However, since SRAM FPGAs are vulnerable in radiation-induced effects, fault tolerance techniques must be developed to support their proliferation in critical applications. SEE mitigation approaches usually combine...
Reliability in digital circuits that operate in radiation prone environments is achieved with significant cost increase. The classical generic solution based on triple modular redundancy triples the cost.
In this work, we present a novel perspective of enhancing the fault tolerance of digital circuits, by employing iterative structures in the processing data-paths. We start by presenting a...
The Controller Area Network (CAN) bus protocol defines a fault-tolerant multi-master serial protocol. Originally it was intended for use in vehicles, but the robustness of the CAN protocol has made it a popular choice in a wide range of control applications, also in the radiation environments seen in space applications or high-energy physics experiments. Electronics designed for radiation...
