Fault (radiation) tolerant soft core?

Question

Is there a certification or some authority that decides if a soft core is fault tolerant or not?

Another question. I've seen that LEON3-FT is radiation tolerant only when implemented on the RTAX Actel FPGA. Is that right?

Excuse me but I'm confused about it because somebody speaks about LEON3-FT (fault tolerant) for space applications, where it is more correct to say radiation tolerant?

And, the last question...is there somebody that knows another soft core "radiation tolerant" (for space application)?

Answer 1

The Actel is not fault tolerant. It is resistant to radiation in the first place. This is because of the way it is design.

Xilinx has some documentation on radiation link text.

I have done satellite FPGA work and don't know of any certification body. Some discussion of the general issue is at link text.

A fault tolerant design will be a start. However since the configuration memory can be corrupted in a SRAM-based design (Xilinx, Altera, Lattice), you have to worry about that too.

Answer 2

This might be useful. There is also a presentation, summarizing the results. These are test done for CERN. They need radiation tolerant ASICs and tested some FPGAs. I think they didn't focus on certification, they just testet how fast they could re-configure a faulty FPGA.

Answer 3

When you say fault tolerant, it means in case a fault occurs due to radiation ion hit, the processor will have the ability to correct it's bit . This is due to the way the processors architecture is designed.

Such kind of fault tolerant IPs can be used with Space grade SRAM based devices & will yet perform somewhat satisfactorily, but i think it will slow down the processor due to fault correction it will have to do due to SRAM FPGA features. Whereas the soft errors will be much much lesser if you use the above IP with a Radiation Hardened FPGA.

The difference between Radiation Hardened & Tolerant : Hardened is no error upto certian rad level, whereas Tolerant will cause certain amount error for certain amt of radiation

Actel can provide data upton request, but provided if you are in USA. ITAR Restrictions apply for all Space Grade devices &

Vendors may ask you to disclose info about yourself before you expect a reply about Radiation tolerant / hardened device.

CERN has used Actel devices (FUSION Family) to correct a Xilinx devices's configuration.