Radiation Environment Emulation for VLSI Designs: A Low Cost Platform based on Xilinx FPGA's

Abstract

As technology shrinks, critical industral applications have to be designed with special care. VLSI circuits become more sensitive to ambient radiation: it affects to the internal structures, combinational or sequential elements. The effects, known as Single Event Effects (SEEs), are modeled as spontaneous logical changes in a running netlist. They can be mitigated at netlist design level by means of inserting massive redundancy logic in the IC memory elements, as well as designing robust deadlock-free state machines. Current techniques for the analysis and verification of the protection logic for VLSI are inefficient and expensive, lacking either speed or analysis. This paper presents the FT-UNSHADES system. This system is a low cost emulator focused on bit-flip insertion and SEE analysis at hardware speed, based on a Xilinx Virtex-IT. Radiation tests are emulated in a highly controlled process, using a non-intrusive method. As a result the system can insert and analyse at least 80K faults per hour in a system with 2 million test vectors.

Fault injection system for SEU emulation in Zynq SoCs

“…In [14][15] fault injection platforms based on a specific board are presented. They achieve high injection performance and they avoid injection side-effects.…”

On the definition of real conditions for a fault injection experiment on embedded systems

“…FTUNSHADES platform is a well-known technology that is described in several papers of the same authors [3] [4]. Only the relevant features for this study are described.…”

Rapid Prototyping of Radiation-Tolerant Embedded Systems on FPGA

“…The FTUnshades system, described in [19], is a FPGAbased platform for the study of digital circuit reliability against radiation-induced transient faults. SEU affecting the circuit are emulated by inducing bit-flips in the circuit under study, by means of partial reconfiguration.…”