Improving soft-error tolerance of FPGA configuration bits

Suresh Srinivasan, Aman Gayasen, N. Vijaykrishnan, M. Kandemir, Y. Xie, M. J. Irwin

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

50 Scopus citations

Abstract

Soft errors that change configuration bits of an SRAM based FPGA modify the functionality of the design. The proliferation of FPGA devices in various critical applications makes it important to increase their immunity to soft errors. In this work, we propose the use of an asymmetric SRAM (ASRAM) structure that is optimized for soft error immunity and leakage when storing a preferred value. The key to our approach is the observation that the configuration bitstream is composed of 87% of zeros across different designs. Consequently, the use of ASRAM cell optimized for storing a zero (ASRAM-0) reduces the failure in time by 25% as compared to the original design. We also present an optimization that increases the number of zeros in the bitstream while preserving the functionality.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number2A.2
Pages (from-to)107-110
Number of pages4
JournalIEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers, ICCAD
StatePublished - Dec 1 2004
EventICCAD-2004 - IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, Digest of Technical Papers - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: Nov 7 2004Nov 11 2004

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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