Single-Event Effects Consortium

The Single-Event Consortium

The Single-Event Effects (SEE) Consortium was founded in 2002 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Xilinx to evaluate re-configurable FPGAs for aerospace applications. The SEE Consortium brings together top experts from industry, government, and academia to test and characterize radiation effects and mitigation techniques for re-configurable FPGAs.

Testing and characterizing radiation effects on high performance, re-configurable FPGAs such as the Virtex™-II FPGA is an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming endeavor. The members of the SEE consortium have combined resources provide more sophisticated and efficient experimentation and analysis.

The Single-Event Effects Consortium strives to:

• Provide independent and unbiased testing and characterization of radiation effects in re-configurable FPGAs.
• Provide independent and unbiased testing and characterization of radiation effect mitigation techniques in re-configurable FPGAs.

Most of the SEE Consortium Members are Xilinx customers who have an integral stake in ensuring unbiased evaluation of re-configurable FPGAs for aerospace applications.

The SEE Consortium Report for Virtex-II Static SEU Characterization is available on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory website.

SEE Consortium Members

Membership to the SEE Consortium is open to US organizations that have an interest in single event effects and mitigation techniques for re-configurable FPGAs. The current SEE Consortium Members are:

• The Aerospace Corporation
• Air Force Research Laboratory
• Brigham Young University
• Boeing
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Lockheed Martin
• Los Alamos National Lab
• ATK Mission Research
• SEAKR Engineering, Inc.
• Sandia National Lab
• UB Computer
• USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
• Vanderbilt University
• Xilinx, Inc.

Radiation Testing

Through experimentation at facilities throughout the U.S., the SEE Consortium characterizes radiation effects on Xilinx FPGAs and configuration PROMs for:

• Latchup
• Static Single-Event Upset (SEU)
• Dynamic Single-Event Upset (SEU)
• Single Event Functional Interrupt (SEFI)
• Total Ionizing Dose (TID)

Details on these effects are provided in conference papers linked through the Radiation Effects page (click on the "Radiation Effects" link on the Navigation Bar to the left).

Mitigation Testing

In addition to characterizing radiation effects in re-configurable FPGAs and Configuration PROMs, the SEE consortium evaluates radiation effect mitigation techniques such as:

• Configuration Scrubbing
• Triple Module Redundancy (TMR)

For details on these mitigation techniques, click on the "Applications" link on the Navigation Bar to the left.