Speaker
Description
Recently, we are witnessing an increasing use of COTS FPGA devices in satellite systems that extend the capabilities of traditional onboard computers and enable the development of emerging space applications. One such device is the AMD-Xilinx Zynq-7000 APSoC, which is a System on Chip (SoC) integrating a dual-core Arm A7 processing system (PS) and modern SRAM FPGA programmable logic (PL). Given that the COTS FPGAs are susceptible to Single Event Effects (SEEs) caused by the ionizing radiation, the SEE characterization of the Zynq-7000 devices is essential for their further deployment in space.
To characterize a chip against SEEs for use in space, radiation test campaigns with heavy ions and protons must be performed. The experimental data should cover a range of heavy ion LETs and proton energies to guarantee accurate prediction of the SEE rates. Given that the Zynq-7000 integrates several SRAM arrays, such as the Configuration RAM and the Block RAMs (BRAMs) of the PL and the On-Chip Memory (OCM) and the processor caches of the PS, all these memories should be individually tested. Several experiments have been presented in the literature investigating the impact of radiation on the Zynq-7000 FPGA device, including our previous heavy-ion tests at CERN (2018) and GSI (2019). However, none of these works has covered the full ranges of energies of heavy ions and protons for all types of SRAM arrays in the chip.
Towards this end, we performed two new radiation campaigns with a high-energy heavy ion beam in GSI and a proton beam in PSI to achieve the complete SEE characterization of the Zynq-7000 APSoC and examine the radiation effects in all its SRAM arrays. Based on the experimental results, we can accurately model the radiation environment for various orbits/missions using the OMERE software and estimate the orbital error rates for the Zynq-7000 APSoC.
Specifically, the goals of the two radiation experiments were: 1) to complete the SEU characterization report for the PL part obtained from our previous heavy-ion experiments 2) to characterize the PL part for SEEs caused by protons; we tested the chip for the full range of proton energies, from 30 MeV up to 250 MeV 3) to characterize the PS part for SEEs caused by heavy ions and protons 4) to study the impact of radiation effects at the application level by running various processor benchmarks for different memory organizations. 5) to examine the effectiveness of the on-chip ECC controller to correct upsets in the DDR memory by irradiating the DDR chips of the board.
In this workshop, we will present the results of our radiation experiments and the estimation of various orbital error rates for the Zynq-7000 APSoC.
