A New Timing Driven Placement Algorithm for Dependable Circuits on SRAM-based FPGAs

Electronic systems for safety critical applications such as space and avionics need the maximum level of dependability for guarantee the success of their missions. Simultaneously the computation capabilities required in these fields are constantly increasing for afford the implementation of different kind of applications ranging from signal processing to networking. SRAM-based FPGAs are the candidate devices to achieve this goal thanks to their high versatility of implementing complex circuits with a very short development time. However, in critical environments, the presence of Single Event Upsets (SEUs) affecting the FPGA’s functionalities, requires the adoption of specific fault tolerant techniques, like Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), able to increase the protection capability against radiation effects, but on the other side, introducing a dramatic penalty in terms of performances. In this paper, it is proposed a new timing-driven placement algorithm for implementing soft-errors resilient circuits on SRAM-based FPGAs with a negligible degradation of performance. The algorithm is based on a placement heuristic able to remove the crossing error domains while decreasing the routing congestions and delay inserted by the TMR routing and voting scheme. Experimental analysis performed by timing analysis and SEU static analysis point out a performance improvement of 29% on the average with respect to standard TMR approach and an increased robustness against SEU affecting the FPGA’s configuration memory. Accurate analyses of SEUs sensitivity and performance optimization have been performed on a real microprocessor core demonstrating an improvement of performances of more than 62%.