Dependability in FPGAs, a Review

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are commonly used in safety-critical and mission-critical systems. In these applications failures are unacceptable, since they can lead to people injured or huge economical losses. Due to Moore's law and the continuous size reduction, electronic devices are able to perform more and more complex functionalities. However, they are becoming more and more vulnerable to radiation. Single event effects (SEE) are the major reliability concern in FPGAs, which are the effects provoked by radiation particles. Dependability has to be addressed at all stages of the system lifecycle, from design to decommissioning, in order to meet the dependability requirements. Since dependability issues have been observed in electronic systems, several dependability mechanisms have been developed. This work makes a review on the existing mechanisms necessary to obtain a dependable system and divides them in four groups; fault prevention, fault tolerance, fault removal and fault forecasting.