A New hardware/software platform and a new 1/E neutron source for soft error studies: testing FPGAs at the ISIS facility

We introduce a new hardware/software platform for testing SRAM-based FPGAs under heavy-ion and neutron beams, capable of tracing the bit-flips in the configuration memory back to the physical resources affected in the FPGA. The validation was performed using, for the first time, the neutron source at the RALISIS facility. The ISIS beam features a 1/E spectrum, which is similar to the terrestrial one with an acceleration between 107 and 108 in the energy range 10–100 MeV. The results gathered on Xilinx SRAM-based FPGAs are discussed in terms of cross section and circuit-level modifications.