SET-PAR: Place and route tools for the mitigation of single event transients on flash-based FPGAs

Abstract

Flash-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (Flash-based FPGAs) are becoming more and more interesting for safety critical applications due to their re-programmability features while being non-volatile. However, Single Event Transients (SETs) in combinational logic represent their primary source of critical errors since they can propagate and change their shape traversing combinational paths and being broadened and amplified before sampled by sequential Flip-Flops. In this paper the SET sensitivity of circuits implemented in Flash-based FPGAs is mitigated with respect to the working frequency and different FPGA routing architecture. We outline a parametric routing scheme and placement and routing tools based on an iterative partitioning algorithm able to generate high performance circuits by reducing the wires delay and reducing the SET sensitivity. The efficiency of the proposed tools has been evaluated on a Microsemi Flash-based FPGA implementing different benchmark circuits including a RISC microprocessor. Experimental results demonstrated the reduction of SET sensitivity of more than 30% on the average versus state-of-the-art mitigation solutions and a performance improvement of about 10% of the nominal working frequency.