Fault injection as a test method for an FPGA in charge of data readout for a large tracking detector

This paper describes how fault injection has been implemented as a test method for an FPGA in an existing hardware configuration setup. As this FPGA is in charge of data readout for a large tracking detector, the reliability of this FPGA is of high importance. Due to the complexity of the readout electronics, irradiation testing is technically difficult at this stage of the system commissioning. The work presented in this paper is therefore motivated by introducing fault injection as an alternative method to characterize failures caused by SEUs. It is a method to study the effect that a configuration upset may have on the operation of the FPGA. The target platform consists of two independent modules for data acquisition and detector control functionality. Fault injection to test the response of the data acquisition module is made possible by implementing the solution as part of the detector control functionality. Correct implementation is validated by a simple shift register design. Our results demonstrate that fault injection can assist in measuring the effect of an implemented mitigation technique in the final design of the FPGA. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.