Research of hardening strategies based on the single event effect induced by atmospheric-like neutrons

This paper proposes a robust Error Correcting Code (ECC) hardening strategy to mitigate soft errors for Static Random-Access Memory (SRAM) based Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) system in a radiation environment. The ECC hardening strategy can check errors of configurable memory and flip-flops (FFs) induced by high-energy particles and locate the position of errors to automatically refresh the circuit. For comparison, the General Matrix Multiplication (GEMM) with no strategy, the GEMM with Distribution TMR (DTMR), and the GEMM with ECC were conducted in the neutron irradiation experiment. The ECC hardening strategy was verified to be effective to mitigate the soft error and the lifetimes of different circuits were assessed in the atmospheric environment. The Geant4 tool was utilized to analyze the physics mechanisms of neutron Single Event Effects (SEE), revealing that neutron energies ranging from 1 MeV to 10 MeV were the primary contributors to inducing SEEs.