Radiation Testing of Altera Devices

Question

I'm looking to see if any radiation testing has been performed on Altera devices. I'm not in need of radiation hard FPGAs, but will be operating in a moderate radiation environment, so am looking for any hard data in terms of TID, SEUs, latchup, etc (beyond the whitepapers that describe how to mitigate SEU).

I'm particularly looking at possibly using the Stratix V 5SGSD5 and Arria V 5AGXB7, but any information/data about either of those families (or about the Cyclone family) would be great.

Thanks

(btw, I posted this to general since I didn't see any other subformus that seemed like the right place; sorry if I posted in the wrong place)

altera_forum · Answer

Xilinx and Actel (Microsemi) have done extensive radiation testing on some of their families. To my knowledge Altera has not, but if I'm wrong about that hopefully someone who knows better will chime in.

Edit: I may have underestimated how much testing Altera does in this area:

https://www.altera.com/support/quality-and-reliability/seu.html

But whenever I've read about space and other rad-hard applications for FPGAs, Xilinx and Actel have been the only players mentioned.

altera_forum · Answer

At JPL, the missions with the highest radiation requirements use Xilinx Virtex-5QV devices which are rated to 1Mrad. Other devices use Microsemi RTAX and ProASIC devices.

The Microsemi SmartFusion2 devices are supposed to be somewhat rad-hard. I purchased a couple of SmartFusion2 kickstarter kits but have not had time to play with them.

I have asked Altera about rad-hard FPGAs and their testing, but never received a particularly satisfying answer.

Cheers,

Dave

altera_forum · Answer

You might contact nuclear power design companies. They may have done tests as well. I doubt the nuclear weapon people would share any test results they have.

altera_forum · Answer

I'd recommend contacting the CREN electronics group or DESY. At DESY ,they have their electronics right next to an accelerator beamline, so I'm not sure if they've done any testing. In addition, the obvious ones I can think of would be the space research groups at places like U of Wisconsin and Boston University. They could at least tell you who to talk to.

And of course, as mentioned earlier, there's always NASA.

altera_forum · Answer

One more comment to add. If your company has lots of money for tools, and you want to use radiation-mitigation features without having to code them (which is tricky, since you have to defeat the synthesis tool optimization!) then take a look at Synplify Premier. It has support for Safe FSMs, Hamming coded FSMs, Triple Module Redundancy (TMR), etc. All the stuff no-one ever taught you about, embedded into the synthesis tool, and turned on with synthesis constraints ... i.e., you get to live on in ignorance (as to how those techniques work), but your designs are safer. This of course assumes your non-rad-hard FPGA survives (no latch-up).

Cheers,

Dave

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Radiation Testing of Altera Devices

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