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 | | Reliability and Fault Management
Our research in this area is motivated by the need for reliable computation in severe environments. We are studying radiation effects on FPGAs as well as faults that might occur as device geometries shrink.
Radiation Effects and Mitigation for SRAM-Based FPGAs
Since 1998, Los Alamos has been involved with a project to put a
reconfigurable computing system based on SRAM FPGAs into space. With
the project, Los Alamos has closely collaborated with Xilinx to characterize the radiation
tolerance of Virtex FPGAs, specifically, the XQVR line of FPGAs. In
addition, Los Alamos and Xilinx have worked together of techniques and
methods for using these FPGAs, which are still susceptible to
single-event upsets, in a radiation environment.
We have been
developing software tools to automatically mitigate SEU
effects so that designers do not have to become both FPGA and
radiation experts to put reconfigurable computing applications into
space. There have been two recent products of this work: a hardware-based SEU emulator and an
automated mitigation tool which removes half-latches from Virtex designs called RadDRC. This work in automatic mitigation of radiation
effects as well as the simulator work has been done in collaboration
with Brigham Young University's Configurable Computing Laboratory. BYU's FPGA Reliability Studies
site provides a nice overview of some of these technologies.
Reliability in nano-scale devices
As device geometries shrink, designing for
reliability will be a significant concern for reconfigurable computing
implemented with nanotechnology. We are studying
methodologies and techniques for analyzing and improving the
reliability of reconfigurable logic systems intended for
implementation using nanotechnology.
As an introduction to our work, we have been working with our
collaborators at Virginia Tech's FERMAT Lab to develop tools to help in the automatic evaluation
of the reliability of logic circuits when implemented using
nanotechnology. This can be found in the Analysis subsection of this Web site.
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