Hi Guys, I am currently designing a FPGA based camera system for a small satellite, its for my masters thesis. As my knowledge is very limited to fpga and vhdl its quite a learning curve. My Question : As space is full of radiation, and it can cause serious issues, is is posible to do development on an altera dev kit de2-70 multimedia one and then just resynth it for a say actel rad hard device. Kind Regards Jacques Kleynhans

Hi, portable design is posible wit some restrictions and problems: - amount of resource in either case and speed limitations - use inference only. i.e. don't instantiate any altera specific modules - you can test that as you build up by running double compilations.

For the radiation resistant feature to be meaningful at all, you have to perform timing analysis for the target platform with a degraded timing model, hopefully available for the device.

Have a think about your application a little bit - some satellites use SRAM based FPGA like Xilinx and Altera and get away without the rad hardening because they only run for short periods of time before they are powered off again. Just a thought - I don't know if it helps or not.

You are absolutely right, havn't thought of it that way. Thx Batfink Can I use something like PROM as a bootloader, for when a error occurs just reload the device. An FPGA can be remotely reconfigured right ??

Have a look at the configuration app note - there' a whole load of stuff in there about different ways of configuring the FPGA. You'll have to dig this out for yourself but I'm sure I've stumbled across a CRC module to detect corrupted FPGA configuration. Bear in mind that you can force the FPGA to reconfigure itself by pulling the nConfig line low and releasing it. So you could have a rad hardened but small and therefore cheaper Actel to do the critical stuff and controlling the power / configuration of a larger SRAM type FPGA. Sorry to be a bit vague with the suggestions - it's not stuff I've really looked into in any really detail before.

VHDL Porting from Altera to Actel | Altera Community

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Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
17 years ago
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Can I use something like PROM as a bootloader, for when a error occurs just reload the device. An FPGA can be remotely reconfigured right ??
--- Quote End ---

I think it is not so easy. If an error occurs on the configuration RAM when the FPGA is already running, you will not detect that (correct me if this is not true). This is not solved by using TMR registers or other radhard techniques, because it produces a direct hardware change, for instance, selecting input b instead of a in a mux21.
Altera_Forum
Honored Contributor
16 years ago
These issues can only be solved with redundant hardware. I did so providing a system to be placed into a particle beam, possibly causing damage almost everywhere in the FGPA.

I had state machines, Data RAMs and ROMS placed more than once and compared results, performed validation of the data streams and such.

The only challange was, to deter Quartus from removing the full redundant logic :-)

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VHDL Porting from Altera to Actel

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