Single Event Upset in SRAM-based Field Programmable Analog Arrays: Effects and Mitigation

In this work the problem of single event upset (SEU) is considered to a new analog technology: the field programmable analog arrays (FPAAs). Some FPAA models are based on SRAM memory cells to implement the user programmability. For this reason, such kind of device becomes vulnerable to SEU when employed in applications susceptible to the incidence of electrical charged particles. In the former part of this work some fault injection experiments are made in order to investigate the effects of SEU in the SRAM blocks of a commercial FPAA. For this purpose, single bit inversions are injected in the FPAA programming bit-stream. In a second moment, a self-recovering scheme using the studied FPAA is proposed. This scheme is able to restore the original programming data if an error is detected. The error detection circuit is built using the internal programming resources of the FPAA and a very simple external logic.