The EuFRATE project aims to research, develop and test radiation-hardening methods for telecommunication payloads deployed for Geostationary-Earth Orbit (GEO) using Commercial-Off- The-Shelf Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). This project is conducted by Argotec Group (Italy) with the collaboration of two partners: Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and Technische Universität Dresden (Germany). The idea of the project focuses on high-performance telecommunication algorithms and the design and implementation strategies for connecting an FPGA device into a robust and efficient cluster of multi-FPGA systems. The radiation-hardening techniques currently under development are addressing both device and cluster levels, with redundant datapaths on multiple devices, comparing the results and isolating fatal errors. This paper introduces the current state of the project's hardware design description, the composition of the FPGA cluster node, the proposed cluster topology, and the radiation hardening techniques. Intermediate stage experimental results of the FPGA communication layer performance and fault detection techniques are presented. Finally, a wide summary of the project's impact on the scientific community is provided.1

As the adoption of SRAM-based FPGAs and Reconfigurable SoCs for High-Performance Computing increased in the last years, the use of Direct Memory Access for data transfer becomes a key feature of many reconfigurable applications even in the space industry. For such kinds of applications, radiation-induced effects are a serious issue that mines the correctness and success of mission-critical tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of proton-induced errors on a DMA-based application implemented on a Xilinx Zynq-7020 FPGA in order to quantify the robustness of this module in a typical hardware-accelerated configuration. The obtained results confirm the high criticality of the DMA module on programmable logic. Moreover, the Multiple Bits Upsets effect has been evaluated. The most recurring patterns have been reported in order to provide further tools to better characterize the behavior of these systems under future fault injection campaigns, as demonstrated in the experimental results.

Due to the decreasing feature sizes of VLSI circuits, radiation induced Single Event Transients (SETs) are increasingly dominating the event ratio on modern VLSI devices. In particular, Flash-based FPGAs are characterized by the main concern of radiation-induced voltage glitches or SETs in the combinational logic. Transient pulses can be sampled by a storage element and can propagate through the circuit up to the outputs and leading to an error. In this paper, we propose a complete implementation flow including sensitivity analysis, fault tolerant mapping and fault tolerance-oriented place and route for the effective design of SET tolerant circuits on Flash-based FPGAs. In details, the proposed method allows accurate measurement of the transient pulse source induced by radiation particles and estimation of the SET error rate on the overall circuit. Besides the developed method provides a netlist mapping and place and route tool for the selective mitigation of SET effects. The proposed method has been applied to an industrial design oriented to the Euclid European Space Agency mission including more than ten different modules. The obtained results show an improvement of the total filtering capability of around 43 times with respect to the original netlist without affecting the timing constraints of the circuit.

This work presents a new EDA flow that aims to increase the design robustness versus transient errors when the dynamic reconfigurable computing paradigm is adopted. In brief, we propose a modification of the existing commercial tool-chain flow to make transient error aware designs. Aiming at that scope, a new algorithm for the design mapping has been developed reducing Single Event Upsets on the routing interactions between reconfigurable placed modules. The performance evaluation of the EDA flow has been evaluated with neutron-based radiation test experiments and fault injection using a proper dynamic reconfiguration context. Results prove a reduction of the transient error sensitivity about 3 orders of magnitude without any area overhead and with a performance degradation of less than 10% on the average.

Predicting soft errors on SRAM-based FPGAs without a wasteful time-consuming or a high-cost has always been a very difficult goal. Among the available methods, we proposed an updated version of analytical approach to predict Single Event Effects (SEEs) based on the analysis of the circuit the FPGA implements. In this paper, we provide an experimental validation of this approach, by comparing the results it provides with a fault injection campaign. We adopted our analytical method for computing the error-rate of a design implemented on SRAM-based FPGA. Furthermore, we compared the obtained soft-error figure with the one measured by fault injection. Experimental analysis demonstrated the analytical method closely match the effective soft-error rates becoming a viable solution for the soft-error estimation at early design phases.

In recent years, use of FPGAs has been gaining more momentum for space applications as there are cases where using them can significantly reduce developments costs and time. In order to ensure correct operation in space, they have to be rad-hard, but most of such components are subject to ITAR. Atmel is the only provider for ITAR-free rad-hard FPGAs, but the default development flow provided leaves much to be desired. The contribution of this work is two-fold: First of all, we present a fully automated flow which improves the usability of the default development flow provided by Atmel, while requiring only a bare minimum of configuration for each design. Secondly, we show how to extend this flow in order to integrate external programs which can be used as in-place substitutions of steps of the default flow. Our experiments show that the proposed flow can significantly boost both the productivity of the designers and the QoR of the final implementations.

This special section of IEEE Transactions on Computers presents some of the latest research developments in the field of adaptive hardware and systems. The creation of this section was motivated by lively discussions held at the annual NASA/ESA Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS) conference, which showed a need for such special section at a top ranked journal. At the end of a rigorous review process, ten papers were selected for publication from a set of high quality submissions consisting of regular papers and extended papers from the AHS 2012 conference proceedings. The articles are then briefly described.

This paper presents an algorithm for the discrimination of faults in FPGAs based on their recovery possibility; some faults can be recovered by reconfiguring the faulty part of the device, others have a destructive effect. After classification has been carried out, the suitable fault recovery strategy is applied, with the final aim of enabling the exploitation of FPGAs, in particular SRAM-based ones, for critical applications, such as the ones in the space environment. In this scenario, we investigate the reliable implementation of the fault classification algorithm, that can be so integrated in an overall reliable system.