Dependability evaluation of Altera FPGA-based embedded systems subjected to SEUs

Dependability evaluation of embedded systems due to the integration of hardware and software parts is difficult to analyze. In this paper, we have proposed an experimental method to determine sensitivity to soft errors in an embedded system exploiting Altera SRAM-based FPGAs. The evaluation is performed using both the hardware and software parts of the embedded system in a single framework. To do this, the HDL hardware model of the target system as well as the C-written software codes of the target system, are required. Both permanent and transient faults are injected into the partially- or fully-synthesizable hardware of the target system and this can be performed during the design cycle of the system. The fault injection is composed of injecting SEUs into user design memory, and used configuration memory of the exploited FPGA. Using the experimental results, the sensitivity of Altera FPGAs to SEU faults are analyzed and derived. The analytical results reveal that the configuration memory is more significant than design memory to the SEUs due to the relative number of SRAM bits. Moreover, in this framework, in the case of injecting SEUs into user memory, the fault injection experiments are accelerated by the cooperation between a simulator and the FPGA.     

基于LZW算法和FPGA的验光仪数据实时无损压缩系统

提出了一种基于FPGA的验光仪的数据实时无损压缩系统,采用LZW算法。首先通过对比分析常用数据无损压缩算法的特点得出LZW算法在实时性、实现复杂度、所需的存储容量、算法的压缩效果和适用的场合方面都有不错的特点,因此以它作为硬件实现的算法。此数据实时无损压缩系统由数据实时无损压缩硬件电路、测试软件、解压软件与读数软件组成,其中数据实时无损压缩硬件电路由数据采集、数据压缩、控制单元、数据存储、电源管理等几部分组成,核心器件是FPGA,利用FPGA芯片内部的RAM资源构成输入数据的缓存器以及LZW算法所需的2个字典存储器,并结合有利于硬件实现的字典管理策略完成了实时无损压缩,同时FPGA还负责对模数转换器、闪存的控制等功能。结果表明该方案所占逻辑资源较少、可移植性强、功能扩展容易,数据的存储和传输效率提高了20%,成本降低了13%。     

A Fault Tolerant Approach for FPGA Embedded Processors Based on Runtime Partial Reconfiguration

The ever increasing adoption of field programmable devices in various application domains for building complex embedded systems based on FPGA processors along with the reliability issues having emerged for FPGA devices built with the latest nanometer technologies, have raised the need for new fault tolerant techniques in order to improve dependability and extend system lifetime. In addition, the runtime partial reconfiguration technology highly mature in the modern FPGA families along with the availability of unused programmable resources in most FPGA designs provide new and interesting opportunities to build advanced fault tolerance mechanisms. In this paper, we exploit the dynamic reconfiguration potential of today’s FPGA architectures and the advances in the related design support tools and we propose a fault-tolerant approach for FPGA embedded processors based on runtime partial reconfiguration. According to the proposed methodology, the processor core is partitioned into reconfigurable modules and each module is duplicated to implement a concurrent error detection mechanism. Precompiled configurations containing spare resources are generated for each duplicated module and are used to repair at runtime the defective modules. Also, a fault tolerance scheme for the proxy logic of the reconfigurable modules, which cannot move in the alternative configurations along with the rest logic, is proposed. Moreover, a compression method for the alternative partial bitstreams, which significantly reduces the high storage space requirements of the proposed approach, is presented. Two different hardware decompression schemes have been implemented in a Virtex-5 device and compared in terms of area overhead and decompression latency. Furthermore, a thorough examination has been performed, regarding how the percentage of the spare resources and their allocation in the reconfigurable regions affect the compression efficiency and the processor performance. Finally, the proposed approach has been demonstrated in three different components – ALU, multiplier-accumulator, and instruction-fetch unit – of an open-source embedded processor.     

Review of advanced FPGA architectures and technologies

Field Programmable Gate Array （FPGA） is an efficient reconfigurable integrated circuit platform and has become a core signal processing mieroehip device of digital systems over the last decade. With the rapid development of semiconductor technology, the performance and system inte- gration of FPGA devices have been significantly progressed, and at the same time new challenges arise. The design of FPGA architecture is required to evolve to meet these challenges, while also taking advantage of ever increased microchip density. This survey reviews the recent development of advanced FPGA architectures, including improvement of the programming technologies, logic blocks, intercon- nects, and embedded resources. Moreover, some important emerging design issues of FPGA archi- tectures, such as novel memory based FPGAs and 3D FPGAs, are also presented to provide an outlook for future FPGA development.     

Minimizing memory access energy in embedded systems by selective instruction compression

We propose a technique for reducing the energy spent in the memory-processor interface of an embedded system during the execution of firmware code. The method is based on the idea of compressing the most commonly executed instructions so as to reduce the energy dissipated during memory access. Instruction decompression is performed on-the-fly by a hardware block located between processor and memory: No changes to the processor architecture are required. Hence, our technique is well suited for systems employing IP cores whose internal architecture cannot be modified. We describe a number of decompression schemes and architectures that effectively trade off hardware complexity and static code size increase for memory energy and bandwidth reduction, as proved by the experimental data we have collected by executing several test programs on different design templates.     

Configuration relocation and defragmentation for run-time reconfigurable computing

Due to its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of applications, reconfigurable computing has become a subject of a great deal of research. By mapping the compute-intensive sections of an application to reconfigurable hardware, custom computing systems exhibit significant speedups over traditional microprocessors. However, this potential acceleration is limited by the requirement that the speedups provided must outweigh the considerable cost of reconfiguration. The ability to relocate and defragment configurations on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can dramatically decrease the overall reconfiguration overhead incurred by the use of the reconfigurable hardware. We therefore present hardware solutions to provide relocation and defragmentation support with a negligible area increase over a generic partially reconfigurable FPGA, as well as software algorithms for controlling this hardware. This results in factors of 8 to 12 improvement in the configuration overheads displayed by traditional serially programmed FPGAs.     

Low-leakage soft error tolerant port-less configuration memory cells for FPGAs

As technology scales the area constraint is becoming less restrictive, but soft error rate and leakage current are drastically increased with technology down scaling. Therefore, in nano-scaled CMOS technology, the reduction of soft error rate and leakage current is the most important challenge in designing field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). To overcome these difficulties, based on the observations that most configuration bit-streams of FPGA are zeros across different designs and that configuration memory cells are not directly involved with signal propagation delays in FPGA, this paper presents a new family of configuration memory cells for FPGAs in nano-scaled CMOS technology. When zeros are stored in the cells, the injected glitch due to particle strike is removed from the stroked node by pull-up or pull-down network of the cells. Thus, our proposed cells are completely hardened and cannot flip from particle strikes at the sensitive cell nodes when zeros are stored in the cells. Furthermore, in the proposed cells, when zeros are stored, the sub-threshold leakage current components are reduced by using stacks of transistors in series. These new cells are port-less and the storage nodes of cells are manipulated through the transistors which apply the supply voltages to the cell. Simulation results show that the proposed cells are working correctly during their configuration and idle cycles and that our cells have a lower soft error rate and leakage current in 22-nm, as well as 65-nm technologies.     

Evaluating Different Solutions to Design Fault Tolerant Systems with SRAM-based FPGAs

The latest SRAM-based FPGA devices are making the development of low-cost, high-performance, re-configurable systems feasible, paving the way for innovative architectures suitable for mission- or safety-critical applications, such as those dominating the space or avionic fields. Unfortunately, SRAM-based FPGAs are extremely sensitive to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) induced by radiation. SEUs may alter the logic value stored in the memory elements the FPGAs embed. A large part of the FPGA memory elements is dedicated to the configuration memory, whose content dictates how the resources inside the FPGA have to be used to implement any given user circuit, SEUs affecting configuration memory cells can be extremely critics. Facing the effects of SEUs through radiation-hardened FPGAs is not cost-effective. Therefore, various fault-tolerant design techniques have been devised for developing dependable solutions, starting from Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) SRAM-based FPGAs. These techniques present advantages and disadvantages that must be evaluated carefully to exploit them successfully. In this paper we mainly adopted an empirical analysis approach. We evaluated the reliability of a multiplier, a digital FIR filter, and an 8051 microprocessor implemented in SRAM-based FPGA’s, by means of extensive fault-injection experiments, assessing the capability provided by different design techniques of tolerating SEUs within the FPGA configuration memory. Experimental results demonstrate that by combining architecture-level solutions (based on redundancy) with layout-level solutions (based on reliability-oriented place and route) designers may implement reliable re-configurable systems choosing the best solution that minimizes the penalty in terms of area and speed degradation.     

A Fault Tolerant Technique for FPGAs

In this paper we present a fault tolerant (FT) technique for field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that is based on incrementally reconfiguring circuits and applications that have been previously placed and routed. Our technique targets both logic faults and interconnect faults, and our algorithms can be applied to either static or run-time reconfigurable FPGAs. The algorithm for reconfiguring designs in the presence of logic faults uses a matching technique. The matching technique requires no preplaced, spare logic resources and is capable of handling groups of faults. Experimental results indicate there is little or no impact on circuit performance for low numbers of reconfigured logic blocks. For interconnect faults, we present a rip-up and reroute strategy. Our strategy is based on reading back the FPGA configuration memory, so no netlist is required for rerouting around faulty resources. Experimental results indicate high incremental routability for low numbers of interconnect faults. We also lay the foundation for applying our approach to yield enhancement.     

A HW/SW Co-Verification Technique for FPGA Test

Field programmable gate arrays （FPGAs） have wide and extensive applications in many areas. Due to programmable feature of FPGAs, faults of FPGAs can be easily tolerated if fault sites can be located. A hardware/software （HW/SW） co-verification technique for FPGA test is proposed in this paper. Taking advantage of flexibility and observability of software in conjunction with high-speed simulation of hardware, this technique is capable of testing each input/output block （IOB） and configurable logic block （CLB） of FPGA automatically, exhaustively and repeatedly. Fault cells of FPGA can be positioned automatically by the proposed approach. As a result, test efficiency and reliability can be enhanced without manual work.     

The flexibility of configurable computing

There has been growing recent interest in configurable computing, which can be viewed as a hybrid between ASICs and programmable processors. Configurable computing machines are implemented with programmable logic: flexible hardware that can be structured to fit the natural organization and data flow of a computation. The enabling device for configurable computing is the field-programmable array (FPGA). For applications characterized by deeply pipelined, highly parallel, and integer arithmetic processing, configurable computing machines can outperform alternative solutions by up to an order of magnitude. The combination in a single device of dedicated hardware and rapid, submillisecond-scale reprogrammability constitutes an exciting and promising development whose implications are only just beginning to be exploited. We begin with a brief tutorial on FPGAs that describes the most common FPGA architectures and how these architectures are used to support computation, memory access, and data flow. We then present FPGAs as computing machines and focus on devices that are reconfigured during run time. Ongoing research involving FPGAs and future directions are also discussed     

New configuration memory cells for FPGA in nano-scaled CMOS technology

In nano-scaled CMOS technology, the reduction of soft error rate and leakage current are the most important challenges in designing Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA). To overcome these challenges, based on the observations that most configuration bit-streams of FPGA are zeros across different designs and that configuration memory cells are not directly involved with signal propagation delays in FPGA, this paper presents three new low-leakage and hardened configuration memory cells for nano-scaled CMOS technology. These cells are completely hardened when zeros are stored in the cells and cannot flip from particle strikes at the sensitive cell nodes. These cells retain their data with leakage currents and positive feedback without a refresh cycle. Simulation results show that the proposed cells are working correctly during their configuration and idle cycles and that our cells have a lower soft error rate and leakage current in 22-nm as well as in 65-nm technologies.     

Flexible and Reconfigurable Implementation of Link Adaptation Algorithms

Reconfigurable systems using FPGAs are of growing interest for the design and implementation of software defined radio transceivers. By reconfiguring an FPGA, its hardware resources can be reused and shared to provide multiple functionalities on a single device. This paper investigates power savings by means of partial reconfiguration for implementing two link adaptation algorithms. These algorithms provide variable performance in terms of spectral efficiency and hardware utilization at different average SNRs. In order to obtain the best tradeoff between (i) spectral efficiency and (ii) area and power consumption, we propose an efficient implementation that switches between the two algorithms by means of partial reconfiguration. Our experimental results show that our implementation provides a high spectral efficiency and, for certain SNR regions, reduces the hardware resources and thereby the power consumption.     

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Dynamic reconfiguration of the FPGA with the use of compressed bit streams

The algorithm is proposed for the compression-decompression of FPGA configuration bitstreams, which provides relatively simple hardware implementation and compression ratios comparable with modern archiving software. The use of this algorithm makes it possible to store configuration bitstreams in the FPGA block memory and cuts the sampling duration by a factor of 2–10. As a result, the ability is provided to dynamically reconfigure the FPGA, which allows for implementation of systems, made on its basis, utilizing various data processing algorithms.     

一种静态随机存储器型现场可编程门阵列的单粒子软错误率的软件分析方法

静态随机存取存储器(SRAM)型现场可编程门阵列(FPGA)在当前空间电子设备中取得了广泛的应用,尽管它对空间辐射引起的单粒子翻转效应极其敏感。在FPGA的配置存储器中发生的单粒子翻转造成的失效机理不同于传统的存储器中的单粒子翻转。因此,如何评价这些单粒子翻转对系统造成的影响就成了一个值得研究的问题。传统的方法主要分为辐照实验和故障注入两种技术途径。本文中提出了一种新的方法,可以用来分析单粒子翻转对构建在FPGA上的系统造成的影响。这种方法基于对FPGA底层结构以及单粒子翻转带来的失效机理的深入理解,从布局布线之后的网表文件出发,寻找所有可能破坏电路结构的关键逻辑节点和路径。然后通过查询可配置资源与相应的配置数据之间关系来确定所有敏感的配置位。我们用加速器辐照实验和传统的故障注入方法验证了这种新方法的有效性。     

基于星地链路的FPGA在轨可重构设计

随着信号处理算法的发展,人们对航天用现场可编程门阵列（Field Programmable Gate Array, FPGA）提出了算法可更新的需求。而传统的固定算法模式已经无法满足要求,所以星上FPGA在轨可重构设计成为了解决这一问题的关键。提出了一种基于星地链路的FPGA在轨可重构设计方案。通过星地链路上载配置数据并将其存入电可擦除只读存储器（Electrically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory, EEPROM）内,然后利用反熔丝器件对FPGA进行大规模算法重配置操作。这项设计方案已经通过了相关验证,同时也提升了星载FPGA的灵活性。     

基于配置模式匹配和层次化映射结构的高效FPGA码流生成系统研究

码流生成在FPGA电子设计自动化(EDA)流程中,提供应用电路在芯片上物理实现所需的精准配置信息。现代FPGA的发展一方面呈现出器件规模及码流容量越来越大的趋势,另一方面越来越多可变阵列大小的嵌入式应用(例如eFPGA)又要求码流生成器具备更高的配置效率以及更精简的可重构数据库。针对码流生成时间增加的问题和阵列规模任意缩放的需求,该文提出一种模式匹配和层次映射的码流生成方法,即对编程单元按配置模式进行分类建模,在配置时按模型进行调用匹配,并采用了层次化的码流映射策略,使得数据库可随阵列排布调整动态生成。该方法可有效应对FPGA嵌入式应用中码流容量的增大以及阵列规模可变所带来的挑战,同时相比平面化的建模及映射方法,码流配置的时间复杂度由O(n)降低为O(lgn)。     

A cost-efficient self-configurable BIST technique for testing multiplexer-based FPGA interconnect

FPGA test cost can be reduced effectively by minimizing the number of test configurations. To realize it, a self-configurable structure was proposed before to test the cross-point-based switch box in FPGA. In this paper, a technique of partially self-configurable multiplexers is presented to reduce the test cost of completely multiplexer-based FPGA interconnect cost-efficiently. The additional self-configured structure, called test point here, is only added to the most efficient configuration ports, which is selected through analyzing test configurations, so the test cost can reduce with the minimal area overhead. It is shown that for testing all interconnect stuck-at faults in FPGAs like Virtex-II and Spartan-3 the test configurations can be reduced to 8 with merely about 1.2% area penalty.     

Design of an Embedded Arabic Optical Character Recognition

This work presents an embedded Arabic OCR system. The proposed system is compact and portable which make it useful for many applications such as blind assistance and language translation. OCR system consists of the sub-systems: image acquisition, pre-processing, segmentation, feature extraction, classification, and post- processing. For each sub-system there are several of algorithms and techniques to be implemented. Working with PCs gives the designer freedom to select the algorithms and techniques according to the required performance, reliability and reusability. However with the embedded systems we are facing many problems and challenges. Such challenges are associated with memory, speed, and computational power. FPGA is selected as the hardware platform for realizing that recognition task. An OCR system is designed and implemented on PC. Then this system is transferred to FPGA after a set of optimization procedures. Utilizing the features of FPGA technology, Hardware / Software co-design is accomplished on an FPGA board. In that design the systems is partitioned into software modules and hardware components to get the advantages of software flexibility and hardware speed. A database of 3000 Arabic characters is used to train and test the performance of the system. The effects of changing the number of features and classification parameters on accuracy, memory and speed are measured. Design points are selected in order to improve the memory required, speed and computation power without affecting the accuracy.     

Obtaining FPGA soft error rate in high performance information systems

Soft errors due to cosmic particles are a growing reliability threat for VLSI systems. The vulnerability of FPGA-based designs to soft errors is higher than ASIC implementations since the majority of chip real estate is dedicated to memory bits, configuration bits, and user bits. Moreover, Single Event Upsets (SEUs) in the configuration bits of SRAM-based FPGAs result in permanent errors in the mapped design.FPGAs are widely used in the implementation of high performance information systems. Since the reliability requirements of these high performance information sub-systems are very stringent, the reliability of the FPGA chips used in the design of such systems plays a critical role in the overall system reliability. In this paper, we compare and validate the soft error rate of FPGA-based designs used in the Logical Unit Module board of a commercial information system with the field error rates obtained from actual field failure data. This comparison confirms that our analytical tool is very accurate (there is an 81% overlap in FIT rate range obtained with our analytical modeling framework and the field failure data studied). It can be used for identifying vulnerable modules within the FPGA for cost-effective reliability improvement.