Reliability Analysis of Optical Fiber Communication for FPGA Clusters in Space

The growing adoption of FPGA-based clusters for space applications is raising the need for reliable, highthroughput interconnects among distributed nodes. Whereas optical fiber links offers a viable and efficient alternative to classical channels, radiation induced faults can still limit such advantages by degrade availability and data integrity through configuration upsets and transient disturbances. Through this paper, the robustness of an Aurora-based optical link is assessed via fault emulation across the full communication chain, including the Aurora-based Data Link Layer, the transceiver control logic, and the optical channel. The results demonstrate the high sensitivity of the infrastructure to radiationinduced faults, reporting an overall Aurora error rate of around 9.1% against SEU emulation and a transceiver sensitivity to SET above 15%.