Designing fault tolerant systems into SRAM-based FPGAs

This paper discusses high level techniques for designing fault tolerant systems in SRAM-based FPGAs, without modification in the FPGA architecture. Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) has been successfully applied in FPGAs to mitigate transient faults, which are likely to occur in space applications. However, TMR comes with high area and power dissipation penalties. The new technique proposed in this paper was specifically developed for FPGAs to cope with transient faults in the user combinational and sequential logic, while also reducing pin count, area and power dissipation. The methodology was validated by fault injection experiments in an emulation board. We present some fault coverage results and a comparison with the TMR approach.