Invited talk I: The foundations of robustness in reconfigurability in a radiation environment: Understanding single-event effects test results on SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

Gary M. Swift has spent the last twenty-five plus years going to accelerators and testing electrical components for their suitability for use in space radiation environments. Gary received a B.S. in Engineering Physics from the University of Oklahoma in 1975 and did graduate work in Nuclear Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After almost two decades at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, he “retired” as a principal engineer in 2007, and moved to Xilinx, Inc. to help develop and test their space-worthy FPGAs. Currently, Gary is the Principal Engineer at the independent consulting firm Swift Engineering and Radiation Services, LLC which he founded, specializing in best-practice SEE testing of complex ICs such as FPGAs and microprocessors. He has publications on a broad range of radiation effects testing including total dose and displacement damage and many single-event effects; for example, in 1992, he coined the now widely used term SEFI. He is co-author on two paper papers that received the NSREC Outstanding Paper Award (in 1999 and 2015). Back in 2001, Gary, then at JPL, and Carl Carmichael of Xilinx started the Xilinx Radiation Test Consortium, a voluntary group of national labs, universities and aerospace companies that collaborate on SEE testing, and he has served as the XRTC main test coordinator and weekly telecom moderator to the present day.