Decentralized run-time recovery mechanism for transient and permanent hardware faults for space-borne FPGA-based computing systems

One of the most important problems for mission critical space-borne computing systems employing FPGA devices is fault tolerance to transient and permanent hardware faults. In many cases, the ability for run-time self-recovery from such faults is a vital feature. This paper presents a method and mechanism for run-time recovery of FPGA-based System-on-Chip (SoC) based on Collaborative Macro-Function Units (CMFUs). Each CMFU consist of a macro-function specific data-path, control unit and circuits providing self-integration, self-synchronization and self-recovery functions for the CMFU, without centralized control. The proposed mechanism allows run-time scrubbing or relocation of faulty components of the SoC providing much higher flexibility and reliability of the system. This mechanism was implemented and tested on a Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA platform. It was determined that the proposed approach can provide seamless run-time recovery for pipelined SoCs, while being transparent to the application.