Single event effect evaluation of different communication ways based on 40nm SRAM-FPGA

Abstract

Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is now considered by an increasing number of designers in various fields of application, such as space and aircraft embedded control systems, image and signal processing. It is a popular way to design different serial communication protocols including serial and network communications implemented by FPGA, which ensure data transfer accuracy and timing. However, single event effects (SEE) can pose a serious threat to the reliability of FPGA in the radiation environments. In order to evaluate the reliability and failure modes of different communication interfaces in radiation environments, three communication protocols were tested by alpha radiation source, including universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART), ethernet, and universal serial bus (USB). The experiments have presented the failure modes and SEE cross sections to different communication ways.