Bonn 2010 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 10: Instrumentierung II

HK 10.3: Talk

Monday, March 15, 2010, 17:00–17:15, HG ÜR 6

Development of a Radiation Tolerant Softcore CPU for SRAM based FPGAs — •Heiko Engel, Jano Gebelein, and Udo Kebschull — Kirchhoff Institute for Physics, Heidelberg University

The usage of SRAM based reconfigurable hardware has become an important instrument for particle physics detector readout or space applications. However, in radiative environments, the accurate operation of SRAM based field programmable hardware cannot be guaranteed. Radiation can alter configuration and state of these devices and thus change their behavior. Common approaches use triple modular redundancy (TMR) in combination with majority voters to compensate radiation induced errors. However, this comes with a large area overhead. This work proposes a fault tolerant softcore CPU for FPGAs with reduced area overhead by using mostly double modular redundant logic to detect errors in combination with continuous FPGA configuration scrubbing to correct them. The effectiveness of the applied methods could be verified with both error emulation and particle beam experiments.