Teaching Fault Tolerant FPGA Design for Aerospace Applications

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), particularly high-density, SRAM-based FPGAs, have vastly increased in features and capabilities to the point where they are a useful, low Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) alternative to low-to-medium volume custom integrated circuit designs. In the aerospace field, however, they have been of limited use due to their high susceptibility to soft error upsets (SEUs). Recent years, however, have seen the proliferation of improved FPGA capabilities, as well as the development of new design techniques that markedly improve the reliability of FPGAs in aerospace environments. The proposed course seeks to bring these new reliability techniques out of development and into the classroom.