Single Event Mitigation for Aurora Protocol Based MGT FPGA Designs in Space Environments

• Main Author: Harding, Alexander Stanley
• Format: Others
• Published: BYU ScholarsArchive 2014
• Subjects: FPGA; radiation testing; BYU; MGT; Aurora; reliability; high-speed serial I/O; Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Online Access: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/4117; https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5116&context=etd

This work has extended an existing Aurora protocol for high-speed serial I/O between FPGAs to provide greater fault recovery in the presence of high-energy radiation. To improve on the Aurora protocol, additional resets that affect larger portions of the system were used. Detection for additional error modes that occurred but were not detected by the Aurora protocol was designed. Radiation testing was performed on the Aurora protocol with the additional mitigation hardware. The test gathered large amounts of data on the various error modes of the Aurora protocol and how the additional mitigation circuitry affected the system. The test results showed that the addition of the recovery circuitry greatly enhanced the Aurora protocol's ability to recover from errors. The recovery circuit recovered from all but 0.01% of errors that the Aurora protocol could not. The recovery circuit further increased the availability of the transmission link by proactively applying resets at much shorter intervals than used in previous testing. This quick recovery caused the recovery mechanism to fix some errors that may have recovered automatically with enough time. However, the system still showed an increase in performance, and unrecoverable errors were reduced 100x. The estimated unrecoverable error rate of the system is 5.9E-07 in geosynchronous orbit. The bit error rate of the enhanced system was 8.47754E-015, an order of magnitude improvement.