A Neutron Generator Testing Platform for the Radiation Analysis of SRAM-based FPGAs

Abstract

SRAM-based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) represent an attractive solution for mission-critical computationally intensive applications due to their high integration, flexibility, and computational capabilities. However, the static memory cells of SRAM-based configuration memory present a high sensitivity to radiation effects. Due to the increasing interest in using these devices in radiation environments such as aerospace and high energy physics, the evaluation of their reliability through radiation tests is a key role in their validation. Radiation Testing consists in exposing the physical device to radioactive source or radiation beams and represents an accurate solution for evaluating the device sensitivity. However, this implies high costs both in terms of experimental setup and money due to the low availability of the required facilities. Among the possible solutions, neutron generator testing would represent an efficient solution even if challenging from the instrumentation needed for the experimental setup. In this work, we present a test instrumentation and methodology specific for cost-effective short-time neutron generator testing to efficiently evaluate FPGA radiation-induced soft error sensitivity.