The Cibola Flight Experiment

Over the past 15 years many organizations have researched the use of Static-Random Access Memory (SRAM)-based Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in space. Although the components can provide a performance improvement over radiation-hardened processing components, random soft errors can occur from the naturally occurring space radiation environment. Many organizations have been developing methods for characterizing, emulating, and simulating radiation-induced events; mitigating and removing radiation-induced computational errors; and designing fault-tolerant reconfigurable spacecraft. Los Alamos National Laboratory has fielded one of the longest space-based FPGAs experiments, called the Cibola Flight Experiment (CFE), using Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. CFE has successfully deployed commercial SRAM FPGAs into a low-Earth orbit with Single-Event Upset (SEU) mitigation and was able to exploit effectively the reconfigurability and customization of FPGAs in a harsh radiation environment. Although older than current state-of-the-art FPGAs, these same concepts are used to deploy newer FPGA-based space systems since the launch of the CFE satellite and will continue to be useful for newer systems. In this article, we present how the system was designed to be fault tolerant, prelaunch predictions of expected on-orbit behaviors, and on-orbit results.