SEU effects on power consumption in FPGAs

SEU effects in the configuration memory are the major cause of fault in SRAM-based FPGAs exposed to ionizing radiation. The mechanism of random changes in the device resource networks has been thoughtfully studied for their impact on the overall logic reliability and fault analysis, but much less effort has been paid in evaluating the effects on power consumption. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the quiescent consumption of a Xilinx Virtex 5 LX50T on the CORE, AUX, MGT and IO power domains during irradiation with 62-MeV proton beams. The tests have been performed at the Superconductive Cyclotron of the LNS-INFN facility (Catania, Italy). Changes in power consumption (most notably in the logic core) are experienced and these effects have to be taken into account when sizing the supply system, especially in applications with severe power budget issues like avionic equipment, satellite payloads and on-detector electronics in High Energy Physics Experiments. We also executed fault injection tests modifying programmable routing resources, in order to confirm or exclude possible fault mechanisms for the SEU-induced current variations.