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A New Reliability-Oriented Place and Route Algorithm for SRAM-Based FPGAs
June 2006 (vol. 55 no. 6)
pp. 732-744
ASCII Text
x 
 
Luca Sterpone, Massimo Violante, "A New Reliability-Oriented Place and Route Algorithm for SRAM-Based FPGAs," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 732-744, June, 2006.
 
 
BibTex
x
 
@article{ 10.1109/TC.2006.82,
author = {Luca Sterpone and Massimo Violante},
title = {A New Reliability-Oriented Place and Route Algorithm for SRAM-Based FPGAs},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Computers},
volume = {55},
number = {6},
issn = {0018-9340},
year = {2006},
pages = {732-744},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TC.2006.82},
publisher = {IEEE Computer Society},
address = {Los Alamitos, CA, USA},
}
 
 
RefWorks Procite/RefMan/Endnote
x 
 
TY - JOUR
JO - IEEE Transactions on Computers
TI - A New Reliability-Oriented Place and Route Algorithm for SRAM-Based FPGAs
IS - 6
SN - 0018-9340
SP732
EP744
EPD - 732-744
A1 - Luca Sterpone,
A1 - Massimo Violante,
PY - 2006
KW - FPGA
KW - transient fault injection
KW - reliability
KW - place and route.
VL - 55
JA - IEEE Transactions on Computers
ER -
 
The very high integration levels reached by VLSI technologies for SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) lead to high occurrence-rate of transient faults induced by Single Event Upsets (SEUs) in FPGAs' configuration memory. Since the configuration memory defines which circuit an SRAM-based FPGA implements, any modification induced by SEUs may dramatically change the implemented circuit. When such devices are used in safety-critical applications, fault-tolerant techniques are needed to mitigate the effects of SEUs in FPGAs' configuration memory. In this paper, we analyze the effects induced by the SEUs in the configuration memory of SRAM-based FPGAs. The reported analysis outlines that SEUs in the FPGA's configuration memory are particularly critical since they are able to escape well-known fault masking techniques such as Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR). We then present a reliability-oriented place and route algorithm that, coupled with TMR, is able to effectively mitigate the effects of the considered faults. The effectiveness of the new reliability-oriented place and route algorithm is demonstrated by extensive fault injection experiments showing that the capability of tolerating SEU effects in the FPGA's configuration memory increases up to 85 times with respect to a standard TMR design technique.

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Index Terms:
FPGA, transient fault injection, reliability, place and route.
Citation:
Luca Sterpone, Massimo Violante, "A New Reliability-Oriented Place and Route Algorithm for SRAM-Based FPGAs," IEEE Transactions on Computers, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 732-744, June 2006, doi:10.1109/TC.2006.82
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