A New Hardware/Software Platform and a New 1/E Neutron Source for Soft Error Studies: Testing FPGAs at the ISIS Facility

Abstract

We introduce a new hardware/software platform for testing SRAM-based FPGAs under heavy-ion and neutron beams, capable of tracing the bit-flips in the configuration memory back to the physical resources affected in the FPGA. The validation was performed using, for the first time, the neutron source at the RAL-ISIS facility. The ISIS beam features a 1/E spectrum, which is similar to the terrestrial one with an acceleration between 10⁷ and 10⁸ in the energy range 10-100 MeV. The results gathered on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs are discussed in terms of cross section and circuit-level modifications.