Scrubbing Mechanism for Heterogeneous Applications in Reconfigurable Devices

Abstract

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) reconfigurable devices have been recognized as one of the most suitable processing devices to be applied in nano-satellites, since they can satisfy and combine their most important requirements, namely processing performance, reconfigurability, and low cost. However, COTS reconfigurable devices, in particular Static-RAM Field Programmable Gate Arrays, can be affected by cosmic radiation, compromising the overall nano-satellite reliability. Scrubbing has been proposed as a mechanism to repair faults in configuration memory. However, the current scrubbing mechanisms are predominantly static, unable to adapt to heterogeneous applications and their runtime variations. In this article, a dynamically adaptive scrubbing mechanism is proposed. Through a window-based scrubbing scheduling, this mechanism adapts the scrubbing process to heterogeneous applications (composed of periodic/sporadic and streaming/DSP (Digital Signal Processing) tasks), as well as their reconfigurations and modifications at runtime. Conducted simulation experiments show the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed solution in terms of system reliability metric and memory overhead.