On Extra Combinational Delays in SRAM FPGAs Due to Transient Ionizing Radiations

This paper presents a new experimental setup (to our knowledge, the first ever) and results obtained with that setup from which we report extra combinational delays in an SRAM FPGA (Virtex-5) due to transient ionizing radiations. The results, obtained by proton irradiation at the TRIUMF laboratory, show that our setup can detect extra combinatorial delays as small as 40 ps, and that delays of more than 400 ps can affect the targeted FPGA. These results strongly suggest that delay faults can potentially be induced by transient ionizing radiations.