Research on agile FPGA fault injection system*

SRAM-based FPGA becomes more and more widely used in aerospace electronic equipment. However, it is susceptible to single event upset in the space radiation environment, leading to soft errors. To evaluate the SEU sensitivity and reliability of the circuit implemented on FPGA, it is necessary to research the SEU sensitivity evaluation tool. In this paper, an agile fault injection system is proposed to evaluate SEU sensitivity. Firstly, the architecture of fault injection is divided into the reusable module and the non-reusable module based on the relevance of user design. Then the non-reusable module is generated adaptively based on the extracted information related to user design. Finally, the fault injection system based on sensitive area is built automatically for user design. Experiments show that the agile fault injection method proposed can provide rapid fault injection system construction and SEU sensitivity evaluation. Our approach reduces the difficultly of applying fault injection, saves time dramatically to build the system manually, and achieves rapid and convenient evaluation of the circuits’ SEU sensitivity.