Reprogrammable FPGAs for Mission-Critical Applications

Abstract

As the previous chapter described, reprogrammable FPGAs are sensitive to ionizing radiation, which may induce a number of possible faults. When deployed in mission- or safety-critical application, reprogrammable FPGAs must be adequately protected against such faults, so that the application they implement operates correctly. As already discussed in detail in the previous chapters, radiation effect mitigation can be implemented at different levels: radiation-hardened silicon process can be exploited so that the resulting FPGA is manufactured using a silicon technology which is by nature immune to radiation effects; radiation-hardened by design FPGAs can be developed by FPGA manufacturers so that they are by construction immune to radiations; application-level mitigation techniques can be exploited in combination with a commercial-off-the-shelf FPGA, so that the implemented application is by design immune to radiation effects.