Speaker
Mr
Adrian Evans
(IROC Technologies)
Description
The first part of the presentation consists of an in-depth study of single event transients (SETs) in MicroSemi ProASIC3L FPGAs. The devices were tested at the Heavy-ion Irradiation Facility (HIF) at Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium. Several combinatorial VersaTile configurations were studied in order to evaluate the effect of logic function and input state on SET sensitivity. The effect of temperature and voltage was also studied. A novel detector circuit was used to perform accurate and calibrated, on-chip measurement of the SET pulse width. Using this detector, pulse broadening was studied and shown to be quite significant for positive (0->1->0) transients. The study also investigated the effect of SETs in several typical complex combinatorial circuits (e.g. adders, state-machines, ..).
The second part of the presentation consists of a study of the sensitivity of the embedded RAM (BRAM), flip-flops and the PLL in the same ProASIC3L devices. This study was performed using a heavy-ion micro-beam at the GSI facility at Darmstadt, Germany where individual ions can be targeted at specific locations in the device with a spatial resolution of better than 1μm. Spatial sensitivity maps were created for the structures being tested and in this way the physical to logical decoding of the BRAMs was determined and the sensitive regions of the PLLs were identified.
In addition, limited results about permanent effects will be presented. Specifically, several of the devices that were tested could not be re-programmed after the exposure to heavy-ions. In some cases, these permanent effects could be reversed through annealing while other devices did not recover.
Taken together, these results provide significant insight into the suitability of ProASIC3L devices for space applications.
Primary author
Mr
Adrian Evans
(IROC Technologies)
Co-authors
Dr
Dan Alexandrescu
(IROC Technologies)
Dr
Véronique Ferlet-Cavrois
(ESA/ESTEC)
