A fast,flexible, and easy-to-develop FPGA-based fault injection technique

By technology down scaling in nowadays digital circuits, their sensitivity to radiation effects increases, making the occurrence of soft errors more probable. As a consequence, soft error rate estimation of complex circuits such as processors is becoming an important issue in safety- and mission-critical applications. Fault injection is a well-known and widely used approach for soft error rate estimation. Development of previous FPGA-based fault injection techniques is very time consuming mainly because they do not adequately exploit supplementary FPGA tools. This paper proposes an easy-to-develop and flexible FPGA-based fault injection technique. This technique utilizes debugging facilities of Altera FPGAs in order to inject single event upset (SEU) and multiple bit upset (MBU) fault models in both flip-flops and memory units. As this technique uses FPGA built-in facilities, it imposes negligible performance and area overheads on the system. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is on average four orders of magnitude faster than a pure simulation-based fault injection. These features make the proposed technique applicable to industrial-scale circuits.     

NEW APPROACH TO EMULATE SEU FAULTS ON SRAM BASED FPGAS简

Field Programmable Gate Arrays （FPGAs） offer high capability in implementing of com- plex systems, and currently are an attractive solution for space system electronics. However, FPGAs are susceptible to radiation induced Single-Event Upsets （SEUs）. To insure reliable operation of FPGA based systems in a harsh radiation environment, various SEU mitigation techniques have been provided In this paper we propose a system based on dynamic partial reconfiguration capability of the modern devices to evaluate the SEU fault effect in FPGA. The proposed approach combines the fault injection controller with the host FPGA, and therefore the hardware complexity is minimized. All of the SEU injection and evaluation requirements are performed by a soft-core which realized inside the host FPGA Experimental results on some standard benchmark circuits reveal that the proposed system is able to speed up the fault injection campaign 50 times in compared to conventional method.     

基于SRAM型FPGA单粒子效应的故障传播模型

SRAM型FPGA在辐射环境中易受到单粒子翻转的影响,造成电路功能失效.本文基于图论和元胞自动机模型,提出了一种针对SRAM型FPGA单粒子效应的电路故障传播模型.本文将单粒子翻转分为单位翻转和多位翻转来研究,因为多位翻转模型还涉及到了冲突处理的问题.本文主要改进了耦合度的计算方式,通过计算FPGA布局布线中的相关配置位,从而使得仿真的电路故障传播模型更接近于实际电路码点翻转的结果,与以往只计算LUT相关配置位的方法比较,平均优化程度为19.89%.最后阐述了本模型在故障防御方面的一些应用,如找出最易导致故障扩散的元胞.     

基于码流的软件控制FPGA故障注入系统

基于静态随机存储器的现场可编程逻辑门阵列应用于航天电子系统时,易受到单粒子翻转效应的影响,存储数据会发生损坏。为评估器件和电路在单粒子翻转效应下的可靠性,提出一种基于TCL脚本控制的故障注入系统,可在配置码流层面模拟单粒子翻转效应。介绍了该故障注入系统的实现机制和控制算法,并将该软件控制方法与传统硬件控制方法进行对比分析。设计了一种关键位故障模型,从设计网表中提取关键位的位置信息,缩小了故障注入的码流范围。在Virtex-5开发板XUPV5-LX110T上的故障注入实验表明,该故障注入系统能有效模拟单粒子翻转效应,与传统随机位故障注入相比,关键位故障注入的故障率提高了近5倍。     

Towards an efficient SEU effects emulation on SRAM-based FPGAs

A novel fault injection approach, reproducing results obtained from radiation ground testing while studying the Single Event Upset (SEU) effects on SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), is presented. This approach can take into account the relative sensitivity difference between configuration bits set to ‘0’ and those set to ‘1’. According to irradiation experiments conducted under proton beam for a Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA at the TRIUMF lab, configuration bits set to ‘1’ are approximately twice as sensitive as bits set to ‘0’. This fact was exploited in test sequence generation while performing fault injection experiments, in order to generate more realistic emulation results. The effectiveness of the approach is validated by comparing its results to those obtained with proton radiation tests, for two different ring-oscillator-based experimental setups. It shows that taking this sensitivity into account helps obtain more realistic results while dealing with delays induced by radiation, which justifies considering this relative sensitivity during fault emulation. In fact, comparing the results obtained from the proposed approach to those obtained at TRIUMF gives an absolute relative error of 3.1 and 14%, respectively, for the first and the second setups, while estimating the error between the latter and results from a conventional random fault injection provides error values of up to 75%. Finally, applying our fault injection approach on a more conventional circuit reveals that taking the relative sensitivity difference into account leads to 2.3 times as many errors detected as with random injection. This last result suggests that not taking the relative sensitivity difference into account during emulation can lead to an underestimation of a design sensitivity to radiation.     

面向航空环境的多时钟单粒子翻转故障注入方法

随着新型电子器件越来越多地被机载航电设备所采用,单粒子翻转(Single Event Upset, SEU)故障已经成为影响航空飞行安全的重大隐患。首先,针对由于单粒子翻转故障的随机性,该文对不同时刻发生的单粒子翻转故障引入了多时钟控制,构建了SEU故障注入测试系统。然后模拟真实情况下单粒子效应引发的多时间点故障,研究了单粒子效应对基于FPGA构成的时序电路的影响,并在线统计了被测模块的失效数据和失效率。实验结果表明,对于基于FPGA构建容错电路,采用多时钟沿三模冗余(Triple Modular Redundancy, TMR) 加固技术可比传统TMR技术提高约1.86倍的抗SEU性能;该多时钟SEU故障注入测试系统可以快速、准确、低成本地实现单粒子翻转故障测试,从而验证了SEU加固技术的有效性。     

Single event soft error in advanced integrated circuit

As technology feature sizes decrease, single event upset (SEU), and single event transient (SET) dominate the radiation response of microcircuits. Multiple bit upset (MBU) (or multi cell upset) effects, digital single event transient (DSET) and analogue single event transient (ASET) caused serious problems for advanced integrated circuits (ICs) applied in a radiation environment and have become a pressing issue. To face this challenge, a lot of work has been put into the single event soft error mechanism and mitigation schemes. This paper presents a review of SEU and SET, including: a brief historical overview, which summarizes the historical development of the SEU and SET study since their first observation in the 1970's; effects prominent in advanced technology, which reviews the effects such as MBU, MSET as well as SET broadening and quenching with the influence of temperature, device structure etc.; the present understanding of single event soft error mechanisms, which review the basic mechanism of single event generation including various component of charge collection; and a discussion of various SEU and SET mitigation schemes divided as circuit hardening and layout hardening that could help the designer meet his goals.     

Hybrid time and hardware redundancy to mitigate SEU effects on SRAM-FPGAs: Case study over the MicroLAN protocol

SRAM-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are particularly sensitive to single event upsets caused by high-energy space radiation. Single Event Upset (In order to successfully deploy the SRAM-FPGA based designs in aerospace applications, designers need to adopt suitable hardening techniques. In this paper, we describe novel hybrid time and hardware redundancy (HT&HR) structures to mitigate SEU effects on FPGA, especially digital circuits that are designed with bidirectional ports. The proposed structures that combine time and hardware redundancy decrease the SEU propagation mechanisms among the redundant hard units. Analysis results and fault injection experiments on some standard ISCAS benchmarks and MicroLAN protocol, as a case study over the bidirectional ports, show that the capability of tolerating SEU effects in HT&HR technique increases up to 70 times with respect to solely hardware redundant versions. On average, the proposed method provides 39.2 times improvement against single upset faults and 14.9 times for double upset faults; however it imposes about 14.7% area overhead. Also, for the considered benchmarks, HT&HR circuits become 8.8% faster on the average than their TMR versions.     

SET Emulation Under a Quantized Delay Model

Single event transient (SET) fault analysis is usually performed through digital simulation at the gate level. However, this method cannot be used for large fault injection campaigns, since gate level simulation is quite slow. In this paper, we propose an approach to build an FPGA based SET emulator, which implements a quantized delay model of the circuit under evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that the quantized delay model produces accurate results and can be easily captured in an FPGA. The proposed approach can be automated to increase SET fault analysis performance by three orders of magnitude with respect to simulation.

Enhanced reliability of finite-state machines in FPGA through efficient fault detection and correction

SRAM based FPGA are subjected to ion radiation in many operating environments. Following the current trend of shrinking device feature size & increasing die area, newer FPGA are more susceptible to radiation induced errors. Single event upsets (SEU), (also known as soft-errors) account for a considerable amount of radiation induced errors. SEU are difficult to detect & correct when they affect memory-elements present in the FPGA, which are used for the implementation of finite state machines (FSM). Conventional practice to improve FPGA design reliability in the presence of soft-errors is through configuration memory scrubbing, and through component redundancy. Configuration memory scrubbing, although suitable for combinatorial logic in an FPGA design, does not work for sequential blocks such as FSM. This is because the state-bits stored in flip-flops (FF) are variable, and change their value after each state transition. Component redundancy, which is also used to mitigate soft-errors, comes at the expense of significant area overhead, and increased power consumption compared to nonredundant designs. In this paper, we propose an alternate approach to implement the FSM using synchronous embedded memory blocks to enhance the runtime reliability without significant increase in power consumption. Experiments conducted on various benchmark FSM show that this approach has higher reliability, lower area overhead, and consumes less power compared to a component redundancy technique.     

基于定向故障注入的SRAM型FPGA单粒子翻转效应评估方法

介绍了一种基于定向故障注入的SRAM型FPGA单粒子翻转效应评估方法。借助XDL工具,该方法解析了Virtex-4 SX55型FPGA的帧地址与物理资源之间的对应关系;将电路网表中的资源按模块分组,利用部分重构技术分别对电路整体及各分组相关的配置帧进行随机故障注入,以评估电路整体及其子模块的抗单粒子翻转能力;按模块分组对电路分别进行部分三模冗余(TMR)加固和故障注入实验,以比较不同加固方案的效果。实验结果表明:电路的抗单粒子翻转能力与其功能和占用的资源有关;在FPGA资源不足以支持完全TMR的情况下,该方法可以帮助设计者找到关键模块并进行有效的电路加固。     

Three-Level Management Algorithm to Increase the SEU Emulation Rate in DPR Based Emulators

Evaluation of the single event upsets (SEUs) impact on SRAM-based FPGAs is a major issue in the adoption of these FPGAs in aerospace applications. In this context, different approaches have been recorded in the literatures, among which the emulation methods are applied most frequently regarding their proper cost-effectiveness and time-saving aspects. This paper has proposed a new approach for increasing the SEU emulation rate in the dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR)-based emulators. Unlike the traditional procedure that emulates the SEU faults only in one loop, the proposed three-level management algorithm (3-LMA) consists of three nested loops. Theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the suggested technique is to some orders of magnitude faster than traditional approach.     

A New Approach to Single Event Effect Tolerance Based on Asynchronous Circuit Technique

Some asynchronous circuit techniques are proposed to provide a new approach to Single Event Effect (SEE) tolerance in synchronous circuits. Two structures, Double Modular Redundancy (DMR) and Temporal Spatial Triple Modular Redundancy with Dual Clock Triggered Register (TSTMR-D), are presented. Three SEE tolerant 8051 cores with DMR, TSTMR-D and traditional Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) are implemented in SMIC 0.35 μm process. The results of fault injection experiments indicate that DMR has a relatively low overhead on both area and latency than TMR, while tolerates SEU in sequential logic. TSTMR-D provides tolerance for both SEU and SET with reasonable area and latency overhead.     

SEU/SET加固D触发器的设计与分析

针对D触发器的抗单粒子辐射效应加固,提出了一种新型的保护门触发器(GGFF)设计,使用两个保护门锁存器串接成主从触发器.通过Spice仿真验证了GGFF抗SEU/SET的能力,通过比较和分析,证明GGFF对于具有同样抗SEU/SET能力的时间采样触发器(TSFF),在电路面积和速度上占据明显优势.     

An FPGA-based dynamically reconfigurable platform for emulation of permanent faults in ASICs

FPGA-based emulation of permanent faults in ASICs can considerably improve the fault simulation time compared to traditional software-based approaches. Moreover, a hardware-based solution provides realistic behavior during fault emulation which is often required in safety-critical systems' validation. Previous emulation approaches not only suffers from considerable area (for instrumentation) and reconfiguration (for fault injection) overheads but also provides limited coverage of the target faults (and fault sites). The latter is due to difficulties in establishing a fault model equivalence when the ASIC structural netlist is passed through the design automation phases of an FPGA. This paper presents a novel approach for fast emulation of permanent faults in ASICs on state-of-the-art dynamically reconfigurable SRAM-based FPGAs while achieving fault model equivalence. Our proposed approach leverages localized run-time in-place Look Up Table (LUT) reconfigurations to avoid the time-consuming bitstream generation process for every ASIC fault. Moreover, the speed of fault injection is enhanced by direct LUT configuration data modification inside a bitstream frame. This results in 17 and 4 times improvements in fault injection speeds over vendor-provided LUT modification libraries and existing partial bitstream based approaches respectively. However, this improvement is achieved at an average 1.2 and 1.1 times degradation in area and delay metrics for the considered mapped circuits which is affordable considering the benefits in terms of the emulation speed.     

一种基于三联锁结构的单粒子翻转加固锁存器

本文提出了一种基于三联锁结构的单粒子翻转加固锁存器。该锁存器使用保护门和反相器在其内部构建三路反馈,以此获得对发生在任一电路节点上的单粒子效应的自恢复能力,有效抑制由粒子轰击半导体引发的电荷沉积带来的影响。本文在详细分析已报道的三种抗辐射锁存器结构可靠性的基础上,针对其在单粒子效应作用下,或单粒子效应和耦合串扰噪声的共同作用下依然可能发生翻转的问题,指出本文提出的锁存器可通过内部的三联锁结构对上述问题进行有效的消除。所有结论均得到电路级单粒子效应注入仿真结果,以及基于经典串扰模型模拟串扰耦合和单粒子效应共同作用的仿真结果的支持和验证。     

基于FPGA定时刷新控制单元的应用技术研究

SRAM型FPGA在航天领域有着广泛的应用,为解决FPGA在宇宙环境中单粒子翻转的问题,适应空间应用需求,给出了一种低成本抗辐照解决方案,对耐辐射FPGA器件进行抗单粒子翻转加固设计。该方案兼容多种型号FPGA芯片,从3片SPI FLASH中读取配置数据,通过串行接口配置FPGA,并在配置完成后按照设定时间周期性刷新芯片,可以满足航天领域对抗辐照型FPGA的使用需求。     

10～20MeV中子引起单粒子翻转的微分析

我们用Monte Carlo方法模拟了10～20MeV中子引起的单粒子翻转。计算了引起电离能量沉积的五种概率。对于一个临界电荷分别为0．05、0．10和0．15pC的16K静态RAM存储器硅片,我们计算了引起单粒子翻转的入射中子平均注量及由(n,α)反应引起的单粒子翻转的概率。给出了三次接近入射中子平均注量的中子引起的单粒子翻转中,在灵敏单元内与电离能量沉积相关的一系列物理量的计算结果。这些结果能够为10～20MeV中子引起的单粒子翻转提供统计的和微观描述的信息。     

高速A/D转换器单粒子效应实时评估系统和方法研究

提出了一种在线实时检测评估高速A/D转换器(ADC)的单粒子效应的测试方法。基于该方法搭建了部分模块可复用的单粒子效应测试评估系统。系统由时钟生成模块、待测ADC模块、D/A转换器(DAC)转换输出模块、FPGA控制模块与上位机模块构成。对待测ADC模块进行重构,可完成对不同ADC器件的测试评估,提升了模块可复用性和测试效率。该系统通过监测电源引脚的电流变化、ADC内部寄存器值翻转情况、经过高速DAC转换输出的模拟波形,可实时测试评估ADC器件的单粒子锁定(SEL)、单粒子翻转(SEU)、单粒子瞬态(SET)、单粒子功能中断(SEFI)等效应。基于该系统对自主研发的具有JESD204B接口的12位2.6 GS/s高速ADC进行了单粒子效应试验。试验分析表明,该系统能准确高效评估高速ADC器件的单粒子效应。     

Simulating Single Event Transients in VDSM ICs for Ground Level Radiation

This work considers a SET (single event transient) fault simulation technique to evaluate the probability that a transient pulse, born in the combinational logic, may be latched in a storage cell. Fault injection procedures and a fast fault simulation algorithm for transient faults were implemented around an event driven simulator. A statistical analysis was implemented to organize data sampled from simulations. The benchmarks show that the proposed algorithm is capable of injecting and simulating a large number of transient faults in complex designs. Also specific optimizations have been carried out, thus greatly reducing the simulation time compared to a sequential fault simulation approach.