Soft-Error-Resilient FPGAs Using Built-In 2-D Hamming Product Code

Radiation-induced soft error rate (SER) degrades the reliability of static random access memory (SRAM)-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). This paper presents a new built-in 2-D Hamming product code (2-D HPC) scheme to provide reliable operation of SRAM-based FPGAs in hostile operating environments such as space. Multibit error correction capability of our built-in 2-D HPC can improve the reliability, and hence, system availability, by orders of magnitude. Simulation results show that the large number of error correction capability of 2-D HPC can recover configuration bits without depending on an external memory preserving a golden copy of the configuration bits. To provide efficient 2-D HPC in a built-in logic, we also propose a new 2-D SRAM buffer. Using the proposed multibit error correction scheme, system availability of an SRAM-based FPGA can be more than 99.9999999% with SRAM cell failures in 1 billion h of operation of 7.