AM&FT: An Aging Mitigation and Fault Tolerance Framework for SRAM-Based FPGA in Space Applications

Abstract

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have become very widely used devices in space applications, and their runtime reconfigurable architecture allows for the area and power acceleration for complex applications. However, FPGAs are increasingly susceptible to aging effects and failures due to harsh space environments and long operation cycles, which reduce the reliability and lifetime of such devices. Although offline aging-aware layout-based methods are effective in aging mitigation, existing studies ignore the fault tolerance needs of the task and the layout strategy will completely fail after a hard failure occurs. This paper presents a reliability framework AM&FT for SRAM-based FPGAs in space applications to support on-chip aging mitigation and fault tolerance. We use an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model to solve mapping relationships between tasks and reconfigurable blocks (Rbs) in the offline phase to achieve the aging and reliability-aware layout strategy. Second, the ILP model is incorporated into the Design Space Exploration (DSE) to generate a set of layout strategies to tolerate hard faults. Moreover, the state model is used for runtime fault management to handle the impact of different types of faults on the device. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves FPGA on-chip aging mitigation and fault tolerance. Compared with the existing methods, AM&FT can guarantee the fault tolerance requirements of tasks and give priority to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) of critical tasks under the condition of hard faults accumulation. In addition, our framework delivers up to [Formula: see text] mean time to failure (MTTF) than the baseline.