Protection and characterization of an open source soft core against radiation effects.

The effects of external radiations on electronic systems are becoming more and more evident with the scaling of the technologies used to produce integrated circuits; in order to reduce these effects, particular techniques are applied during the design and the production of electronic devices. These problems are crucial for the following fields: ˆ Automotive; ˆ Space; ˆ High Energy Physics; Because of the low cost and the high versatility of FPGAs, these devices are replacing custom solutions and radiation hardened microcontrollers in electronic systems working in harsh radiation environments; especially for what concerns the high energy physics experiments, the high bandwidth guaranteed by commercial SRAM-based FPGAs is particularly useful for the Readout electronics. Despite these advantages, a microcontroller able to easily perform common automation jobs, like com- municating with other systems, could be necessary in order to avoid the growing of firmware complexity for FPGAs-based systems; for this reason, Soft Cores are programmed on FPGAs. The usage of soft microcontrollers in harsh radiation environments requires the application of specific techniques with the object of reducing the possibility of a misbehavior during the operational time of the device. The purpose of this study is, starting from a core already designed and tested at functional level, to explore the techniques that could be applied in order to harden the core using both commercial tools and custom approaches. The whole research has been performed in the framework of the ITS (Inner Tracking System) Detector update for the ALICE experiment; the design has been developed and tested on a Kintex Ultrascale XCKU040 FPGA from Xilinx.