Radiation-induced Effects on DMA Data Transfer in Reconfigurable Devices

As the adoption of SRAM-based FPGAs and Reconfigurable SoCs for High-Performance Computing increased in the last years, the use of Direct Memory Access for data transfer becomes a key feature of many reconfigurable applications even in the space industry. For such kinds of applications, radiation-induced effects are a serious issue that mines the correctness and success of mission-critical tasks. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of proton-induced errors on a DMA-based application implemented on a Xilinx Zynq-7020 FPGA in order to quantify the robustness of this module in a typical hardware-accelerated configuration. The obtained results confirm the high criticality of the DMA module on programmable logic. Moreover, the Multiple Bits Upsets effect has been evaluated. The most recurring patterns have been reported in order to provide further tools to better characterize the behavior of these systems under future fault injection campaigns, as demonstrated in the experimental results.