Design of radiation tolerant FPGAs for the LLNL nanosecond gated CMOS camera program

Chris Macaraeg; Matthew Dayton; Brad Funsten; Arthur Carpenter

doi:10.1117/12.2322694

11 September 2018 Design of radiation tolerant FPGAs for the LLNL nanosecond gated CMOS camera program

Chris Macaraeg, Matthew Dayton, Brad Funsten, Arthur Carpenter

Proceedings Volume 10763, Radiation Detectors in Medicine, Industry, and National Security XIX; 107630N (2018) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2322694
Event: SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications, 2018, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

The Nano-Second Gated CMOS Camera (NSGCC) team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed a radiation tolerant camera for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments at NIF with total yields of 10^16 neutrons. To achieve the desired level of operational reliability in a prompt dose environment, several firmware hardening strategies were evaluated, such as redundancy, auto-recovery from single-event upsets (SEU), and remote manual recovery if a SEU causes the system to hang. These approaches work well in a low-dose rate space environment; however, it was not clear how they would perform in a high-dose rate environment. The team generated several exploratory FPGA firmware builds with varying levels of protective circuitry and timing margin, subjected the camera to prompt dose radiation using a 20 ns short pulse x-ray source, and varied the dose. Based on this testing, a hardening strategy to achieve the highest level of radiation tolerance was identified, resulting in an FPGA firmware design that had a high probability of remaining operational in NIF’s radiation environment during a high yield shot.

Citation Download Citation

Chris Macaraeg, Matthew Dayton, Brad Funsten, and Arthur Carpenter "Design of radiation tolerant FPGAs for the LLNL nanosecond gated CMOS camera program", Proc. SPIE 10763, Radiation Detectors in Medicine, Industry, and National Security XIX, 107630N (11 September 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2322694

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