Fine-Grained Fast Field-Programmable Gate Array Scrubbing

Field-programmable gate arrays provide several relevant advantages for critical systems, such as flexibility and high performance. However, their use in critical systems requires efficient means to mitigate transient faults in the configuration bits. This paper focuses on an alternative mechanism to reduce the repair time of traditional scrubbing approaches. It relies on fine-grained error detection and partial reconfiguration. The fine-grained information is used to dynamically choose an optimized starting position for the scrubbing procedure, reducing the mean repair time. We explore the design space provided by the technique and propose an approach to make resilient diagnosis of configuration faults. The efficiency, scalability, and robustness of the proposed mechanisms are evaluated.