Position sensitive radiation detector integrated with an FPGA for radiation tolerant computing

A position sensitive radiation sensor was modeled, developed and fabricated then interfaced with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) to create a radiation hardened computing platform. The system exploits environmental information from the sensor in order to determine regions within the FPGA that may have been affected by radiation. The spatial radiation sensor provides the computer system with the location of radiation strikes. This information is used by the computer system to avoid and repair effected circuits on the programmable fabric. By giving the recovery circuitry insight into the location where a fault may have occurred, the latency between detection of a fault and repair can be reduced. This provides an additional level of reliability by more efficiently detecting and correcting faults in SRAM-based FPGAs faults compared to the traditional voting and sequential search approaches.