Obtaining FPGA soft error rate in high performance information systems

Abstract Soft errors due to cosmic particles are a growing reliability threat for VLSI systems. The vulnerability of FPGA-based designs to soft errors is higher than ASIC implementations since the majority of chip real estate is dedicated to memory bits, configuration bits, and user bits. Moreover, Single Event Upsets (SEUs) in the configuration bits of SRAM-based FPGAs result in permanent errors in the mapped design. FPGAs are widely used in the implementation of high performance information systems. Since the reliability requirements of these high performance information sub-systems are very stringent, the reliability of the FPGA chips used in the design of such systems plays a critical role in the overall system reliability. In this paper, we compare and validate the soft error rate of FPGA-based designs used in the Logical Unit Module board of a commercial information system with the field error rates obtained from actual field failure data. This comparison confirms that our analytical tool is very accurate (there is an 81% overlap in FIT rate range obtained with our analytical modeling framework and the field failure data studied). It can be used for identifying vulnerable modules within the FPGA for cost-effective reliability improvement.