Improving FPGA Reliability with Wear-Levelling

As VLSI circuits achieve smaller geometries, reliability is becoming an growing problem. The flexibility of FPGAs enables novel techniques for meeting this challenge, and one such technique is wear-levelling: periodic reconfiguration to eliminate electrical stress hotspots. In this work we have have carried out accelerated-life experiments in FPGAs to assess the feasibility of three wear-levelling strategies for reducing timing degradation. All three techniques resulted in significant improvements to robustness compared with a static configuration, and we have demonstrated that wear-levelling is a promising tool for improving FPGA reliability.