Radiation Induced Fault Detection, Diagnosis, and Characterization on FPGAs

ISBN: 1288397496

Author: Getz, Thomas B

Condition: New

The development of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has been a great achievement in the world of microelectronics. One of these devices can be programmed to replace the need for thousands of individual specialized devices. Despite their great versatility, FPGAs are still extremely vulnerable to radiation from cosmic waves in space. Extensive research has been conducted to examine how radiation disrupts FPGAs. This research incorporates and enhances current methods of radiation detection. A design is created that has the ability to detect flipped bits and delay errors caused by radiation along with their location, amount and duration. All of this is accomplished and reported in real time. The design requires more testing, but once that is done this system can be incorporated with FPGA reconfiguration methods that automatically place application logic away from failing errors of the FPGA. This system has great potential to become a valuable tool in fault mitigation.