Application-oriented SEU sensitiveness analysis of Atmel rad-hard FPGAs

Radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) SRAM-based FPGAs will play a crucial role in providing new generations of satellites with reliable in-flight reconfiguration ability, which is mandatory to enable the successful use of configurable computing in space. RHBD SRAM-based FPGAs sensitiveness against ionizing radiation is normally evaluated resorting to radiation testing, which provides the device cross-section. However, as a matter of fact, applications implemented on such devices use only a portion of the available resources, and the corresponding configuration memory. As a result, application-oriented sensitiveness analysis tools are needed that, by analyzing how the FPGA resources are actually used by a given application, produce application cross-section that is a reliability figure more accurate than device cross section. This paper presents a novel application-oriented sensitiveness analysis tool we are developing for the new generation of SRAM-based FPGAs from Atmel: the ATF280E.