Reliability Analysis of the FPGA Control System with Reconfiguration Hardening

Fault Tolerance, Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration Controller, FPGA, Reliability Analysis.

A computing power is important in space applications where a utilization of FPGAs is very useful. However, the FPGAs are susceptible to manifestations of radiation which can cause malfunction. Particularly dangerous are configuration memory faults known as Single Event Upsets (SEUs), which can lead to the entire system failure. Therefore, the fault-tolerant techniques are used to prevent system failures. The main motivation for the use of these techniques is to maintain the correct behavior of the system despite the occurrence of faults. In addition to fault masking, which only delay system failures due to fault accumulation, the utilization of fault mitigation by partial dynamic reconfiguration was used. Everything needed is provided by the reconfiguration controller, which is a necessary additional component of the entire system. It is also very convenient to be able to detect the occurrence of fault in the system. After that, the system does not have to be restored unnecessarily, which saves useless work of the controller. The key part is the evaluation of the resilience to faults of the system using the reconfiguration of damaged parts. In all experiments, an experimental platform was used that emulates an electromechanical system, which consists of a robot control unit on an FPGA and a simulation of their behavior on a PC. Artificial faults have been injected into this controller on the FPGA. Furthermore, reliability estimation data, which was collected from our previously published simulations, was verified on a real system in our current experimentation.