AN 866: Mitigating and Debugging Single Event Upsets in Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition

ID 683869
Date 9/28/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

2. Debugging Single Event Upset Using the Fault Injection Debugger

You can detect and debug single event upset (SEU) using the Fault Injection Debugger in the Intel® Quartus® Prime software. Use the debugger with the Intel FPGA Fault Injection IP core to inject errors into the configuration RAM (CRAM) of an Intel FPGA device.

The injected error simulates the soft errors that can occur during normal operation due to SEUs. Since SEUs are rare events, and therefore difficult to test, you can use the Fault Injection Debugger to induce intentional errors in the FPGA to test the system's response to these errors.

The Fault Injection Debugger is available for Intel® Arria® 10 and Stratix® V family devices. For assistance with support for Arria® V or Cyclone® V family devices, file a service request using your My Intel account.

The Fault Injection Debugger provides the following benefits:

  • Allows you to evaluate system response for mitigating single event functional interrupts (SEFI).
  • Allows you to perform SEFI characterization, eliminating the need for entire system beam testing. Instead, you can limit the beam testing to failures in time (FIT)/Mb measurement at the device level.
  • Scale FIT rates according to the SEFI characterization that is relevant to your design architecture. You can randomly distribute fault injections throughout the entire device, or constrain them to specific functional areas to speed up testing.
  • Optimize your design to reduce SEU-caused disruption.