Robust Quantum Communication for Space Systems Through an Heterogeneous RISC-V based FPGA/SoC Platform

Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) is increasingly adopted in security-critical links and future scenarios will include also space applications where radiation-induced faults can compromise the correctness and availability of the protocol. This risk is amplified on SRAM-based FPGAs, where configuration upsets can alter circuit behavior. Through this paper, we present a robust, heterogeneous FPGA/SoC platform to validate the reliability of QKD sifting on commercial off-the-shelf hardware. A lightweight RISC-V processor supervise the entire procedure, while the sifting accelerator is coupled with a lightweight monitoring unit to detects faults and triggers error correction through partial reconfiguration. The platform has been implemented on AMD ZCU102 UltraScale+ development boards and evaluated through fault injections. The adopted mitigation techniques allows downtime reduction by about 12000 × and lowers the sifting-module error rate by around 2%.