An online fault injection method for the dynamic partial reconfiguration system based on a lightweight ICAP controller

Abstract

Nowadays most FPGAs use SRAM-based technology, which are sensitive to radiation-induced Single Event Upsets (SEUs). To validate the reliability of FPGA, fault injection is widely used to simulate the SEUs. However, current fault injection researches mostly focus on offline. With the emerging of dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) technology, the requirement of online fault injection is becoming more and more urgent. This paper proposed an ICAP controller-based online fault injection method and developed an ICAP controller for DPR system. The designed ICAP controller injects SEUs by firstly reading back one frame from the specific address to local RAM, and then reconfiguring the fault frame to the original position. Moreover, it consumes half resources used by the Xilinx’ AXI_HWICAP, a quarter of those used by AC_ICAP and one tenth of those used by FT_ICAP. The experiments were conducted on a Xilinx Artix7 and validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.