A bit-interleaved embedded hamming scheme to correct single-bit and multi-bit upsets for SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

Single Event Upsets (SEUs) inadvertently change the configuration bits of Static-RAM (SRAM)-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), leading to erroneous output until the error has been corrected. Scrubbing using an Error Correction Code (ECC) such as hamming is a popular method to correct such faults. However, current works either require a large external memory to store the ECCs or can at most correct only one error in a frame. This paper proposes a novel bit-interleaved embedded hamming scheme along with scrubbing, to correct single (SBUs) and multi-bit upsets (MBUs) in SRAM-based FPGAs. This scheme does not require an external memory to store the ECCs, as they are embedded within the configuration memory itself. Experiments conducted on various benchmarks show that the proposed scheme can handle multiple errors per frame very well, with an embedding efficiency of over 99.3%.