This book introduces the concepts of soft errors in FPGAs, as well as the motivation for using commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) FPGAs in mission-critical and remote applications, such as aerospace. The authors describe the effects of radiation in FPGAs, present a large set of soft-error mitigation techniques that can be applied in these circuits, as well as methods for qualifying these circuits under radiation. Coverage includes radiation effects in FPGAs, fault-tolerant techniques for FPGAs, use of COTS FPGAs in aerospace applications, experimental data of FPGAs under radiation, FPGA embedded processors under radiation and fault injection in FPGAs. Since dedicated parallel processing architectures such as GPUs have become more desirable in aerospace applications due to high computational power, GPU analysis under radiation is also discussed.

Fernanda Lima Kastensmidt joined the Instituto de Informática faculty in 2005. She received a PhD in 2003 and MSE in 1999 both in Computer Science from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil. Dr. Fernanda’s current research focuses on soft error mitigation techniques for SRAM-based FPGAs and integrated circuits, such as microprocessors, memories and network-on-chips (NoCs), and the analysis and modeling of radiation effects in those circuits. Paolo Rech is an Adjunct Professor for the Instituto de Informática.