Characterization of Soft Errors on a 28-nm SRAM-based FPGA under Neutron Radiation Exposure

When using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) in safety-critical and harsh environments, it is important to understand possible faults and implement appropriate mitigation to prevent critical system errors. Electronic components can be affected by radiation, including naturally occurring background radiation. Due to their reconfigurability, FPGAs exhibit faults not only with regard to application data but also the configuration memory, which defines the functionality of the logic circuit. This paper proposes an experiment that irradiates a logic circuit running on Artix-7-35T FPGA devices using neutron radiation with a particle energy of 2.45 MeV. During the irradiation, data is written into the on-device block RAM components and read back for further investigation. The data read back from the device is checked for errors in both the configuration and the functional level memory. A static analysis of the radiation effects, which can be used as a basis for a statistical fault model, is presented, and a brief discussion of dynamic effects, including transient errors, is given.