Cf-252 neutron soft-error tolerance of an optoelectronic field programmable gate array VLSI

Recently, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have come to be used widely for various applications. Nevertheless, the serial configuration function of FPGAs is well-known to be vulnerable to radiation in terms of total-ionizing-dose and soft-error tolerances. In order to increase the total-ionizing-dose tolerance of the configuration function of FPGAs, optically reconfigurable gate arrays that can support an optical parallel configuration have been developed. This paper presents an experiment to assess the soft-error tolerance of an optically reconfigurable gate array against neutron radiation.