"FT-UNSHADES: A New System for SEU Injection, Analysis and Diagnostics over Post Synthesis Netlist"
M. Aguirre1, J.N. Tombs1, F. Muñoz1, V. Baena1, A. Torralba1, A. Fernández-León2, F. Tortosa-López2
1Escuela Superior de Ingenieros Universidad de Sevilla Camino de los Descubrimientos
2Data Systems Division. ESTEC/TOS-ED European Space AgencyAbstract:
FT-UNSHADES is a radiation environment emulator, where faults are injected over a already executing netlist over a specific hardware facility, in a strongly controlled way. It is a system dedicated to the injection, analysis diagnostics of SEUs over digital designs that are going to be synthesized and fabricated in a VLSI technology, and mainly dedicated to space applications.
The analysis is focused to circuits that are to be protected using redundancy techniques –space, automotive or health support applications-, and consists of a test before fabrication using a prototype that is emulated using a Xilinx FPGA. Faults are injected to selected flip-flops of the design at precise instants of time, emulating the radiation effects on a circuit, all in a deterministic and controlled way.
Once the design netlist has been protected using TMR or others, it can be fully verified previously to circuit fabrication. Software has been developed to permit:
- Detection of parts of a large circuit that accidentally could be left unprotected.
- Detection of non-critical parts of a circuit that can be safely left unprotected.
- Control over the fault insertion, to effect only chosen submodules of the system, within controlled time windows for concentrated analysis.
- Essay complex SEU models (double, triple SEU and others).
- Analyze how the bit-flips are propagated through the running design netlist and how internal parts are affected.
- Prototype and Debug a design netlist loaded onto the system using the patented UNSHADES debugger.
System has been tested using third party space IPs coming from ESA IPs Database. Design flow is extremely clean. No instrumenting techniques for FFs are perfoirmed, circuits are treated as “black boxes”. Results of these experiences will be reported in the extended paper.
References and Notes
- http://www.gte.us.es/~aguirre/Web_unshades/ftunshades.htm
- The FT-UNSHADES system is the result of a collaboration agreement between European Space Agency and the University of Sevilla (SPAIN).