Mitigating Single-Event Upsets (WP395)

www.xilinx.com 1 © Copyright 2012–2015 Xilinx, Inc. Xilinx, the Xilinx logo, Artix, ISE, Kintex, Spartan, Virtex, Vivado, Zynq, and other designated brands included herein are trademarks of Xilinx in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Occasionally, electronic devices exhibit erroneous behavior for no apparent reason. Through careful experimental design and statistical analysis, scientists and engineers discovered that normal background radiation is often the cause. These failures are generally rare and, thus, easily ignored for common applications. However, for high-assurance applications, it is important to consider the role of background radiation in system reliability. Reliability problems due to radiation most commonly fall into the category termed single-event effects (SEE) and show up as a type of soft errors called single-event upsets (SEUs).