Assessment of Router Failures Under Proton Beam Radiation

This paper reports radiation test results of a network on chip (NoC) with star topology with the purpose of evaluating the susceptibility of the central router to radiation faults. The test was performed in the IFJ PAN cyclotron by subjecting two Basys-3 Field Programmable Array (FPGA) boards to proton radiation at different energy levels. We analyzed the router behavior under load and were able to identify the central router as a single point of failure, requiring attention should NoCs remain part of the architecture of Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) FPGA-based system architectures for applications in space and on the ground. We performed the test with protected and unprotected nodes to confirm that the router is the source of failure when struck with proton radiation. We highlight possible innovative solutions, including router redundancy and dynamic reconfiguration of routers, as part of our exploration of how high traffic throughput can be maintained in critical situations by constructing radiation-resilient NoCs.