Radiation tolerance in FPGAs is an important field of research particularly for reliable computation in electronics used in\naerospace and satellite missions. The motivation behind this research is the degradation of reliability in FPGA hardware due\nto single-event effects caused by radiation particles. Redundancy is a commonly used technique to enhance the faulttolerance\ncapability of radiation-sensitive applications. However, redundancy comes with an overhead in terms of excessive\narea consumption, latency, and power dissipation. Moreover, the redundant circuit implementations vary in structure and\nresource usage with the redundancy insertion algorithms as well as number of used redundant stages. The radiation\nenvironment varies during the operation time span of the mission depending on the orbit and space weather conditions.\nTherefore, the overheads due to redundancy should also be optimized at run-time with respect to the current radiation level.\nIn this paper, we propose a technique called Dynamic Reliability Management (DRM) that utilizes the radiation data,\ninterprets it, selects a suitable redundancy level, and performs the run-time reconfiguration, thus varying the reliability\nlevels of the target computation modules. DRM is composed of two parts. The design-time tool flow of DRM generates a\nlibrary of various redundant implementations of the circuit with different magnitudes of performance factors. The run-time\ntool flow, while utilizing the radiation/error-rate data, selects a required redundancy level and reconfigures the computation\nmodule with the corresponding redundant implementation. Both parts of DRM have been verified by experimentation on\nvarious benchmarks. The most significant finding we have from this experimentation is that the performance can be scaled\nmultiple times by using partial reconfiguration feature of DRM, e.g., 7.7 and 3.7 times better performance results obtained\nfor our data sorter and matrix multiplier case studies compared with static reliability management techniques. Therefore,\nDRM allows for maintaining a suitable trade-off between computation reliability and performance overhead during runtime\nof an application.
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