On Reliability Technology Of FPGA Program In Nuclear-Related Controller

The nuclear-related controller is the core equipment of the protectionsystem, and its design reliability is directly related to the implementationof the security features of the protection system. FPGAs are widely used innuclear-related controllers in view of that the reliability design measures ofFPGAs are more flexible than that of the microprocessor technology. TheFPGA programming reliability is an important guarantee of the reliabilityof nuclear-related controller. When a digital signal transfer in differentclock domains of an FPGA chip, the metastable phenomenon may appear,and the signal would be in an indeterminate state, i.e. non logic high or low,resulting in the FPGA internal logic error. On the other hand, in nuclearpower application, the FPGA’s internal registers may flip unexpectedly dueto the single-particle radiation, causing the system function failure. Thusmetastability and single event upset are two important factors to affect thereliability of the controller FPGA.This article has done a detailed analysis of the functionalrequirements of the FPGA in the nuclear-related controller. This paper hasalso studied metastability and single event upset phenomenon which affectthe reliability of the controller FPGA, analysised the failure modes of thecontroller FPGA, built up the transfer function of metastability and singleevent upset, proposed the method to improve the reliability of FPGAprogram design of nuclear-related controller based on the control theory. Inthe end, this article has proposed the method to design the controller FPGAwith Qsys, and done analysis of the reliability of the Qsys design method.