Heavy ion characterization of SEU mitigation methods for the Virtex FPGA

This work presents the results from heavy ion tests of Xilinx Virtex FPGA XQVR300 manufactured by Xilinx in a 0.25μm technology. Virtex XQVR300 is an SRAM-based FPGA, which allows for real-time reconfigurable computing. Reprogrammable logic would offer the benefit of on-orbit design changes. Earlier SEU testing on this type of device has reported high sensitivity to heavy ions. Mitigation techniques of single event upsets in Virtex devices as triple module redundancy (TMR) and configuration readback (bitstream repair) have been developed by Xilinx and are tested in this work.