Reliability and Safety Issues of FPGA Based Designs

With decreasing price and growing computational power FPGAs become interesting solution for growing set of embedded applications. It is often considered competitor for MCU or ASIC based solutions, mainly for their good ratio of computational capacity to price and its flexibility. Unfortunately the FPGA technology has some specifics that complicate their deployment in systems with requirements on high reliability and safety integrity. The most severe reliability issue is susceptibility to radiation induced errors. This paper introduces to this problem, techniques that are used to cope with it and gives comparison to MCU based solution.