Fault injection into SRAM-based FPGAs for the analysis of SEU effects

SRAM-based FPGAs are currently utilized in applications such as industrial and space applications where high availability and reliability and low cost are important constraints. The technology of such devices is sensible to Single Event Upsets (SEUs) that may be originated mainly from heavy ion radiation. This paper presents a fault injection method that is based on emulated SEU on the configuration bitstream file of commercial SRAM-based FPGA devices to study the error propagation in these devices. To demonstrate the method, an Altera FPGA, i.e. the Flex10K200, and the ITC'99 benchmark circuits are used. A fault injection tool is developed to inject emulated SEU faults into the circuits. The results show that between 33 to 45 percent of the SEUs injected to the FPGA device have propagated to the output terminals of the device.