Optical multi-context blind scrubbing for field programmable gate arrays

Abstract

This paper presents aproposal of a new optical multi-context blind scrubbing that can not only increase the soft-error tolerance of the configuration memory of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) but also support high-speed dynamic reconfiguration suitable for accelerating FPGA operations. The optical multi-context blind scrubbing operation uses a holographic memory as a soft-error free radiation-hardened external memory. It exploits its two-dimensional large-bandwidth optical bus. Optical multi-context blind scrubbing operation was demonstrated with four configuration contexts. The soft-error tolerance of the scrubbing operation was evaluated using a radiation tolerance experiment using two 4-MBq Americium-241 alpha particle sources. Results show the worst case mean time to repair (MTTR) of the scrubbing operation as 560 ns, which can realize sufficient soft-error tolerance in radiation-rich space environments.