A Programmable Configuration Controller for fault-tolerant applications

FPGAs are promising candidates for computational tasks in space applications. However, they are susceptible to radiation-induced errors, the most common failure being due to the corruption of their configuration memory. Module-based partial reconfiguration and frame-based scrubbing are the two most commonly used techniques for detecting and recovering from configuration memory errors. Both methods require user-designed reconfiguration controllers (RC) to read and write FPGA configuration memory data. This paper proposes a Programmable Configuration Controller (PCC) specifically designed for fault-tolerant applications. PCC has a soft Application Specific Instruction Set Processor (ASIP) architecture. The PCC is software programmable using the C language, which allows it to be used in a wide variety of fault-tolerant applications with minimal design and/or hardware overhead. PCC also has instruction extensions to accelerate commonly-used reconfiguration operations such as reading and writing configuration data. Through 5 case studies, we demonstrate that the use of an ASIP architecture for reconfiguration control in applications prone to radiation-induced corruption strikes the right balance between speed, resource utilization and flexibility.