Statistical Method to Extract Radiation-Induced Multiple-Cell Upsets in SRAM-Based FPGAs

Radiation-induced multiple-cell upsets (MCUs) are a concern because they can overcome the protection of error correction code and triplicated designs. Extracting MCU data from radiation tests is helpful to perform more accurate fault injection tests, where MCUs could be simulated with the injection of bits based on the MCUs shapes, sizes, and frequencies. This article presents a statistical method to extract MCU shapes and frequencies from components with no information regarding their physical layout. The proposed method can be used to extract MCU information from BRAM and CRAM alike. The results show the MCU data for three families of Xilinx field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).