Autonomous Fault-Tolerant Systems onto SRAM-based FPGA Platforms

This paper presents an approach for increasing the lifetime of systems implemented on SRAM-based FPGAs, by introducing fault tolerance properties enabling the system to autonomously manage the occurrence of both transient and permanent faults. On the basis of the foreseen mission time and application environment, the designer is supported in the implementation of a system able to reconfigure itself, either by reloading the correct configuration in case of transient faults, or by relocating part of the functionality in presence of permanent faults. The result is a system implementation offering good performance and correct functionality even when faults occur. The proposed approach is evaluated in a case study to highlight the overall characteristics of the final implementation.