A New Analytical Approach to Evaluate the Radiation Sensitivity of Circuits Implemented on SRAM-Based FPGAs

Abstract

Current approaches to estimate the radiation sensitivity of field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based designs, rely mainly on radiation testing or fault injection, and have demonstrated some limitations in providing a comprehensive understanding of the predominant failure modes and vulnerabilities of the design. In this article, a new approach to evaluate the radiation sensitivity of systems implemented on SRAM-based FPGAs is presented. This approach is based on the analysis of the design netlist, parsing all the circuit branches to extract the potentially critical configuration bits and considering the circuit workload to accurately relate the error propagation phenomena. This analytical approach is validated by comparing its radiation sensitivity estimation with the one provided by state-of-the-art radiation qualification techniques. These results show that the proposed approach not only provides a fast and accurate sensitivity estimation of the design but also provides comprehensive internal visibility over the predominant sources of failures and vulnerabilities.