Test results of an ITER relevant FPGA when irradiated with neutrons

Conference · Wed Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/ANIMMA.2015.7465563· OSTI ID:22531250

Batista, Antonio J. N.; Santos, Bruno; Fernandes, Ana; Goncalves, Bruno ^[1]; Leong, Carlos; Teixeira, Joao P. ^[2]; Ramos, Ana Rita; Santos, Joana P.; Marques, Jose G. ^[3]

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1. Instituto de Plasmas e Fusao Nuclear, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisboa, (Portugal)
2. Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores - Investigacao e Desenvolvimento, 1000-029 Lisboa, (Portugal)
3. Centro de Ciencias e Tecnologias Nucleares, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 2695-066 Bobadela, (Portugal)

The data acquisition and control instrumentation cubicles room of the ITER tokamak will be irradiated with neutrons during the fusion reactor operation. A Virtex-6 FPGA from Xilinx (XC6VLX365T-1FFG1156C) is used on the ATCA-IO-PROCESSOR board, included in the ITER Catalog of I and C products - Fast Controllers. The Virtex-6 is a re-programmable logic device where the configuration is stored in Static RAM (SRAM), functional data stored in dedicated Block RAM (BRAM) and functional state logic in Flip-Flops. Single Event Upsets (SEU) due to the ionizing radiation of neutrons causes soft errors, unintended changes (bit-flips) to the values stored in state elements of the FPGA. The SEU monitoring and soft errors repairing, when possible, were explored in this work. An FPGA built-in Soft Error Mitigation (SEM) controller detects and corrects soft errors in the FPGA configuration memory. Novel SEU sensors with Error Correction Code (ECC) detect and repair the BRAM memories. Proper management of SEU can increase reliability and availability of control instrumentation hardware for nuclear applications. The results of the tests performed using the SEM controller and the BRAM SEU sensors are presented for a Virtex-6 FPGA (XC6VLX240T-1FFG1156C) when irradiated with neutrons from the Portuguese Research Reactor (RPI), a 1 MW nuclear fission reactor operated by IST in the neighborhood of Lisbon. Results show that the proposed SEU mitigation technique is able to repair the majority of the detected SEU errors in the configuration and BRAM memories. (authors)

• Research Organization: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - IEEE, 3 Park Avenue, 17th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10016-5997 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22531250
• Report Number(s): ANIMMA--2015-IO-196
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY
CONTROL
CORRECTIONS
DATA ACQUISITION
DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEMS
INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
IRRADIATION
ITER TOKAMAK
MEMORY DEVICES
MITIGATION
NEUTRONS
OPERATION
RADIATION EFFECTS
RELIABILITY
REPAIR
SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPY
SENSORS