Faculty of Science, Technology and Medicine
Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust
Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
Luxembourg Centre for European Law
Luxembourg Centre for Socio-Environmental Systems
The Doctoral School in Science and Engineering is happy to invite you to Gelmar Luiz DA COSTA’s defence entitled
Mitigating Radiation Effects in Network on Chip Logic
Supervisor: Assoc. Prof Marcus VÖLP
This thesis explores flaws in hardware that have occurred in recent years, as we confirmed in proton radiation tests on a Basys3 FPGA and by simulating the behavior of a network-on-chip (NoC).
Within the research conducted, a gap in information about the effects of proton radiation on this Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) architecture was discovered. This is also linked to the need to explore router flaws in a NoC, which are themselves vulnerable points, and ultimately a crucial point for future research on data centers in space.
Looking at potential innovative solutions, including router redundancy, which is widely known and dynamic router reconfiguration, little explored in the literature.
To address this issue, we explore how high traffic throughput can be maintained in critical situations by building radiation-resistant NoCs that allow us to correct the error without needing to reboot the entire system or rerun the entire bitstream, thus mitigating router failures.
However, as their complexity evolves along with the complexity of MPSoCs in which FPGAs are often integrated, it becomes crucial to address their security more deeply, strongly impacting the integrity and availability of the project.
We also address a system capable of proactively removing radiation-induced faults. We tested our solution with two levels of hybridization (MIDIR and SHARCS) described in hardware and simulated on a FPGA, and tested it on a large scale with the software-level simulator booksim2. With our solutions, we can increase the failure resilience of satellites and critical ground systems and pave the way for future high-performance and highly resilient data servers in space.
The dissertation comprises seven publications, which collectively contribute to descriptive and prescriptive knowledge.
Three main publications are already published, two more as co-authors, one of which is already published. And two main contributions that are yet to be published and are in the final stages.
Overall, this thesis presents the failures of NoC routers in a radioactive environment, followed by possible solutions to address the problem.