Automating Radiation Effects Mitigation with FPGA Synthesis

FPGA designers of aerospace and defense applications have long wrestled with radiation effects. More recently, due to shrinking technology nodes, concerns have arisen about radiation-related upsets in other safety- or mission-critical applications such as medical devices, networking gear, and commercial avionics. Smaller geometries in FPGAs mean that an energetic particle can more easily alter the current flow and charge storage of a device’s configuration SRAM. In fact, policymakers for DO-254, the design assurance standard for airborne hardware, are now encouraging hardware designers to examine and address radiation-effects issues through mitigation techniques.