Design and implementation of a radiation-hardened on-board FPGA maintenance control chip

Satellites using SRAM-type FPGAs may have Single-Event Upset (SEU), Single-Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI), and other malfunctions because of the space radiation environment. This paper designs and implements a radiation-resistant hardened maintenance control chip for SRAM-type FPGAs, which can achieve SEU and SEFI mitigation of FPGAs in radiation environment and satellite on-orbit software upgrading. By introducing a control register mapping mechanism, the design of the maintenance control chip supports the full range of SRAM-type FPGAs for satellites and offers reliability enhancement designs for bitstream load, scrubbing, readback and SEFI fault detection and recovery of SRAM-type FPGAs, etc. Simultaneously, the chip allows the management of FPGA software in-orbit update and software version selection and switching, thus enhancing the versatility of SRAM FPGA in-orbit application while enhancing its dependability. Finally, radiation tests on the designed FPGA maintenance control chip show that it satisfies the criteria for use in a variety of satellite orbital radiation environments.