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http://dx.doi.org/10.6109/jkiice.2017.21.3.601

Availability Analysis of SRAM-Based FPGAs under the protection of SEM Controller  

Ryu, Sang-Moon (Department of Information and Control Engineering, Kunsan National University)
Publication Information
Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering / v.21, no.3, 2017 , pp. 601-606 More about this Journal
Abstract
SRAM-based FPGAs mainly used to develop and implement high-performance circuits have SRAM-type configuration memory. Soft errors in memory devices are the main threat from a reliability point of view. Soft errors occurring in the configuration memory of FPGAs cause FPGAs to malfunction. SEM(Soft Error Mitigation) Controllers offered by Xilinx can mitigate the influence of soft errors in configuration memory. SEM Controllers use ECC(Error Correction Code) and CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Code) which are placed around the configuration memory to detect and correct the errors. The correction is done through a partial reconfiguration process. This paper presents the availability analysis of SRAM-based FPGAs against soft errors under the protection of SEM Controllers. Availability functions were derived and compared according to the correction capability of SEM Controllers of several different families of FPGAs. The result may help select an SRAM-based FPGA part and estimate the availability of FPGAs running in an environment where soft errors occur.
Keywords
FPGA; soft error mitigation; reliability; availability analysis;
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