Ultrahigh Energy Heavy Ion Test Beam on Xilinx Kintex-7 SRAM-Based FPGA

In recent years, field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices have attracted a lot of attentions due to the increasing performance they provide thanks to technology scaling, besides their high flexibility through in-field reprogramming and/or partial reconfiguration capability. However, when such devices are to be deployed in safety- and mission-critical applications such as avionic and space applications, it is mandatory to verify the reliability of the device in the target environment where radiation effect is considered as one of the major sources of faults in the system. For static random access memory (SRAM)-based FPGA devices, the SRAM cells holding the configuration data for the circuit implemented on the devices are highly susceptible against single-event upset (SEU) induced by charged particle striking the device and one single SEU in the configuration memory may corrupt the implemented circuit design causing system misbehavior. In this paper, we present the radiation test data on Xilinx Kintex-7 SRAM-based FPGA using ultrahigh energy heavy-ion test beam for the first time available to third-party radiation test in CERN.