A Novel Soft Error Tolerant FPGA Architecture

Due to reaching the nanoscale transistor size, effect of single event upset (SEU) to the memory has become conspicuous. In small device geometries, a single particle strike might affect multiple adjacent cells in a memory array resulting in a multiple bit upset (MBU). Traditional fault tolerance technologies such as triple modular redundancy (TMR) and error correcting code (ECC) occupy the large area and have vulnerability to MBU. In this research, we propose DMR based error correct circuit and employ a combination of proposed circuit and the interleaving technique to mitigate MBU. In addition, we explain soft error simulator developed to calculate bit interleaving distance. The results show that the area of proposed circuit is the smallest when we compare the proposed circuit, ECC based error correct circuit and TMR. Simulation results show that the interleaving distance which can conceal all MBU patterns is 4.