On Adaptive Single-Event Effect Mitigation in Reconfigurable FPGAs

This thesis discusses adaptive mitigation of non-destructive radiation effects (static single-event effect) in environments with varying radiation (e.g. Earth orbits). The adaptive mitigation scheme overcomes the problem of the permanent overhead of static mitigation caused by systems designed according to the worst case condition. It is implemented in a single FPGA including sensor primitives, radiation condition analysis, and reconfiguration in an autonomous manner. The system is evaluated with the parameter of the performability, which is a combination of performance and availability. The optimum of this performability is improved by a factor of 2.32 in a geostationary Earth orbit compared to the state of the art. During the observation interval of 7.67 years (2010 to 2017), the FPGA is configured with triple modular redundancy less than 10 % of the time. During the rest of the time (>90 %) the FPGA may perform a more sophisticated digital signal processing or may save power. Furthermore, this thesis provides systems designers a useful tool to determine which kind of mitigation is appropriate and most beneficial.