(MAPLD Conference)
B6: Peter
Alfke and Rick Padovani
Xilinx Corp.
"Radiation Tolerance of High-Density FPGAs"
SRAM-based high-density FPGAs offer many
advantages in satellite and other aerospace applications: High level of integration to
greater than 100,000 system gates, no NRE, low power consumption, and - most important-
the ability to be reconfigured in the operating system, allowing system upgrades in space.
A perceived drawback is the susceptibility of configuration latches to radiation-induced
upsets.
Heavy-ion testing at Brookhaven have established that the specially processed Xilinx
XQR4000XL-family devices exhibited latch-up immunity at LET > 100 MeV*cm2/mg at 125
degrees C. These test also showed a very low probability of soft errors in their
configuration-storage latches and user flip-flops. Also, neutron tests performed in
Scandinavia show excellent results.
Xilinx FPGAs offer a unique “readback” capability that can monitor all storage
cells on the chip without interfering with the operation of the device in the system. This
makes it possible to build triple-redundant systems that can detect and repair a soft
error within a fraction of a second, and thus avoid any accumulation of errors.
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