Berlin 2005 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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HK: Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 41: Instrumentation und Anwendungen

HK 41.7: Vortrag

Mittwoch, 9. März 2005, 15:30–15:45, TU MA041

Improving on FPGA Radiation Tolerance — •Gerd Tröger and Udo Kebschull — Kirchoff-Institut für Physik, Universität Heidelberg

In recent years, FPGAs have become an alternative to ASICs for experiment electronics due to their computational power, flexibility and cost efficiency. However, SRAM-based FPGAs are even more sensitive to irradiation than other electronics. Several methods for compensation exist (expensive flash technology, redundancy, bit-scrubbing).

We will present results from irradiation tests of Xilinx Virtex-II Pro devices performed at the cyclotrons in Oslo and Uppsala, comparing them to previous tests of Altera APEX devices. Adding a simple repair technique called ‘bit-scrubbing’, which is using the active partial reconfiguration feature of the Virtex FPGAs, shows promising improvements. In combination with classical redundancy methods we can demonstrate improvements in radiation tolerance by an order of magnitude.