On-line testing of permanent radiation effects in reconfigurable systems

Partially reconfigurable systems are more and more employed in many application fields, including aerospace. SRAM-based FPGAs represent an extremely interesting hardware platform for this kind of systems, because they offer flexibility as well as processing power. In this paper we report about the ongoing development of a software flow for the generation of hard macros for on-line testing and diagnosing of permanent faults due to radiation in SRAM-FPGAs used in space missions. Once faults have been detected and diagnosed the flow allows to generate fine-grained patch hard macros that can be used to mask out the discovered faulty resources, allowing partially faulty regions of the FPGA to be available for further use.