SEU and SEFI Protection for DDR3 Memories in a Xilinx Zynq-7000 FPGA

In satellite on-board computers, memories are one of the components that need protection against radiation. Their effects can cause several types of errors like: Single Event Upsets (SEUs) that affect a bit of memory, Multiple-Cell Upsets (MCU), which corrupt several bits, and Single Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI) in control circuits, which can cause malfunction of the entire memory chip. This paper describes an implementation on the Zynq-7000 System on Chip (SoC) of a VHDL design which incorporates Error Correction Codes (ECC) for DDR3 memories. The proposed design is based on the use of Orthogonal Latin Square (OLS) codes, which not only provide error correction to all single bit errors, but also double correction for data bits. It is able to retrieve the contents of a memory device from the information of the others when a SEFI occurs with a simultaneous SEU (instead of the basic Single-bit Error Correction-Double-bit Error Detection SEC-DED).