Automatic Generation of Redundant Configuration in Xilinx FPGAs

Field programmable gate arrays play a key role in particle physics experiments for real-time data transfer and processing. The usage of such devices in the radiation environments of detectors at colliders or at fixed-target experiments requires to cope with radiation effects. Radiation-induced single event upsets in the device configuration are the dominant issue for static random access memory based field programmable gate arrays. Solutions based on configuration redundancy have been proposed for hardening the configuration memory of commercial off-the-shelf static-random-access-memory-based field programmable gate arrays. In these, the configuration is majority voted by the firmware to correct radiation-induced configuration upsets. In this work, we introduce an automatic methodology to generate a redundant configuration for static-random-access-memory-based field programmable gate arrays. The methodology is based on copying the configuration fragments to be protected to unused ones, measuring the impact of the copy on the power consumption of the field programmable gate array and on the functionality of the firmware. We implemented a hardware setup and a software tool to realize and test this idea. The method is completely agnostic with respect to the device, the only requirement being the possibility to write and read back the configuration. This is supported by most of the modern devices.