Radiation environment emulation for VLSI designs: a low cost platform based on xilinx FPGA's

As technology shrinks, critical industral applications have to be designed with special care. VLSI circuits become more sensitive to ambient radiation: it affects to the internal structures, combinational or sequential elements. The effects, known as Single Event Effects (SEEs), are modeled as spontaneous logical changes in a running netlist. They can be mitigated at netlist design level by means of inserting massive redundancy logic in the IC memory elements, as well as designing robust deadlock-free state machines. Current techniques for the analysis and verification of the protection logic for VLSI are inefficient and expensive, lacking either speed or analysis. This paper presents the FT-UNSHADES system. This system is a low cost emulator focused on bit-flip insertion and SEE analysis at hardware speed, based on a Xilinx Virtex-II. Radiation tests are emulated in a highly controlled process, using a non-intrusive method. As a result the system can insert and analyse at least 80K faults per hour in a system with 2 million test vectors.