Dynamic Heavy Ion SEE Testing of Microsemi RTG4 Flash-based FPGA Embedding a LEON4FT-based SoC

Abstract

The Cobham Gaisler LEON4FT is a fault-tolerant synthesizable VHDL model of a 32-bit processor core, compliant with the SPARC V8 architecture. The model is highly configurable and particularly suitable for System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. The processor is the basis of the Cobham Gaisler GR740, a radiation-tolerant SoC that features a quad-core LEON4FT processor, as well as several other peripherals. The Microsemi RTG4 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is fabricated using a low-power, 65 nm CMOS Flash technology, which is known to provide higher immunity to radiation-induced errors than SRAM-based FPGAs. This work performs a dynamic test of RTG4 FPGA embedding a LEON4FT-based SoC under heavy ion-induced single event effects. The results obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the fault-tolerant techniques adopted at both device and design levels in a real application.