Neutron Radiation Testing of a TMR VexRiscv Soft Processor on SRAM-Based FPGAs

Abstract

Soft processors are often used within field-programmable gate array (FPGA) designs in radiation hazardous environments. These systems are susceptible to single-event upsets (SEUs) that can corrupt both the hardware configuration and software implementation. Mitigation of these SEUs can be accomplished by applying triple modular redundancy (TMR) techniques to the processor. This article presents fault injection and neutron radiation results of a Linux-capable TMR VexRiscv processor. The TMR processor achieved a <inline-formula> <tex-math notation= LaTeX >$10\\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> improvement in SEU-induced mean fluence to failure with a cost of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation= LaTeX >$4\\times $ </tex-math></inline-formula> resource utilization. To further understand the TMR system failures, additional post-radiation fault injection was performed with targets generated from the radiation data. This analysis showed that not all the failures were due to single-bit upsets, but potentially caused by multibit upsets, nontriplicated IO, and unmonitored nonconfiguration RAM (CRAM) SEUs.