Research on the FPGA Reconfiguration Technology Based on RS Code for Nuclear Applications

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is now widely used in nuclear safety Instrumentation and Control (I&C) systems and operates core features like communication, signal capturing and processing, peripheral controlling etc. Those features are crucial to the entire system, which means the state of the FPGA is vital to the system as well. In nuclear I&C industry, single event effect (SEE) is a common hazard faced by the nuclear facilities which are exposed to the high radiation environment, because it may cause register upsets on static random-access memory (SRAM) devices and interfere the well-functioning of them. One popular method to solve this issue is fault diagnose, while this method only finds out the errors, not corrects them. To improve the solution, forward error correction technology, which is widely used in communication industry, is proposed to combine with the FPGA reconfiguration to check and rectify the upsets. Reed-Solomon (RS) Code is chosen to reinforce the core configuration data and to correct the faults by reconfiguration when diagnose problems occurs. Experiment was taken on the demo board to verify the viability of this strategy. The results indicate that this strategy can improve the FPGA against single event upset (SEU), thereby increase the system reliability in this aspect.