In order to avoid these errors, there are two main approaches. These upsets are caused by ionizing radiation strikes that alter the charge in storage elements such as configuration memory cells, user memory or registers, causing non-permanent errors in the systems. For these scenarios, not only area, delay and power consumption play an important role in the design process, but also fault tolerance is mandatory in order to deal with soft errors such as single event upsets (SEUs), multiple bit upsets (MBUs) or single event functional interrupt (SEFIs) produced by radiation. The reliability feature for communication systems that must work in harsh environments such as space or radioactively contaminated areas, is a major concern nowadays. Finally, the integration of the automatic configuration memory error-injection (ACME) tool to speed up the fault injection process is explained in detail at the end of the paper. To illustrate this procedure, an online repository with a complete project and a step-by-step guide is provided, using as device under test a classical communication component such as a finite impulse response (FIR) filter. In this paper, a tutorial for the setup of a fault injection emulation platform based on the Xilinx soft error mitigation (SEM) intellectual property (IP) controller is depicted step by step, showing a complete cycle.
These tests could be driven into accelerator facilities through ionization processes or they can be performed using fault injection tools based on software simulation such as the SEUs simulation tool (SST), or based on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation like the one described in this work. After the implementation of the protected modules, the communication modules must be tested to assess the achieved reliability. In order to avoid this erroneous functioning, this kind of systems are usually protected using redundant logic such as triple modular redundancy (TMR) or error correction codes (ECCs). Communication systems that work in jeopardized environments such as space are affected by soft errors that can cause malfunctions in the behavior of the circuits such as, for example, single event upsets (SEUs) or multiple bit upsets (MBUs).