A fault injection methodology and infrastructure for fast single event upsets emulation on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

Modern SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly employed in safety- and mission-critical applications. However, the aggressive technology scaling is highlighting the increasing sensitivity of such devices to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) caused by external radiation events. Assessing the reliability of FPGA-based systems in the early design stages is of upmost importance, allowing design exploration of different protection alternatives. This paper presents a Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration-based fault injection methodology implemented by an integrated infrastructure for SEUs emulation in the configuration memory of Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs. The proposed methodology exploits the Xilinx Essential Bits technology to extremely speed-up fault injection, ensuring correct operations of the fault injection infrastructure during the whole injection process.