Reliability Analysis of Field-Programmable Gate-Array-Based Space Computer Architectures

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the radiation tolerance of field-programmable gate-array-based space computers. The primary failure mechanism studied in this paper is single-event effects due to high-energy ionizing radiation. The analysis is performed on the most common architectures deployed on field-programmable gate-array-based systems including simplex, triple modular redundant, inclusion of spares, and configuration memory scrubbing. The reliability of each system is modeled using a Markov chain to predict its mean time to failure. Orbital dependencies are discussed in addition to a comparison of reliability across different process nodes.