Rapid prototyping of radiation-tolerant embedded systems on FPGA

Abstract

Technological advances of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) are making that this technology becomes the most preferred platform for the rapid prototyping of highly integrated digital systems. In addition, protection of processor-based systems to mitigate the harmful effects of radiation-induced upset events is gaining importance while technology shrinks. In this context, the main contribution of this work is a novel rapid prototyping approach for the codesign of dependable embedded systems using FPGA. This is supported by a hardening platform that allows combining software-only fault-tolerance techniques with hardware-only approaches, representing several trade-offs among design constraints, reliability and cost. As case study, several radiation-tolerant embedded systems have been developed based on a technology-independent version of the Picoblaze processor.