Online monitoring soft errors in reconfigurable FPGA during radiation test

Due to rapid technology scaling, electronic devices are becoming more susceptible against soft errors induced by radiation particles, which is a serious challenge for aerospace applications. Meanwhile Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices have been attracting attention in safety- and mission-critical applications in recent years with the increasing performance and flexibility they provide. Among different types of FPGAs according to the device technology, the SRAM-based FPGA has a higher sensitivity against soft errors as SRAM cell, which is used for storing the configuration data of the circuit design implemented and mapped on the FPGA, is one of the most sensitive devices against radiation induced soft errors. Hence, to guarantee the usage of SRAM-based FPGAs in safety critical environments, the design mapped on it requires an effective verification and validation procedure. Radiation test is one of the verification methods regarding the effects of radiation induced soft errors. In this paper, we present an automated setup for monitoring the soft errors during the radiation test and we compared the measurement obtained from radiation test with the one provided by analytical tools. The experimental results we gained demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed measurement platform.