Reliability Tests of the LHC Beam Loss Monitoring FPGA Firmware

The LHC Beam Loss Monitoring (BLM) system is one of the most complex instrumentation systems deployed in the LHC. In addition to protecting the collider, the system also needs to provide a means of diagnosing machine faults and deliver a feedback of losses to the control room as well as to several systems for their setup and analysis. It has to transmit and process signals from almost 4’000 monitors, and has nearly 3 million configurable parameters. In a system of such complexity, firmware reliability is a critical issue. The integrity of the signal chain of the LHC BLM system and its ability to correctly detect unwanted scenarios and thus provide the required protection level must be ensured. In order to analyze the reliability and functionality, an advanced verification environment has been developed to evaluate the performance and response of the FPGA-based data analysis firmware. This paper will report on the numerous tests that have been performed and on how the results are used to quantify the reliability of the system.