Radiation Tolerant Viterbi Decoders for On-Board Processing (OBP) in Satellite Communications

• 作 者: Zhen Gao Lina Yan Jinhua Zhu Ruishi Han Ullah Anees Reviriego Pedro
• 机 构: School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin 300072, China“,”Depart
• 出 处: 中国通信（英文版）
• 发表日期: 2020年1期
• 关键词: viterbi decoder on-board pro-cessing FPGA user memory fault tolerance single eve

Mod satellite communication systems require on-board processing (OBP) for performance improvements, and SRAM-FP-GAs are an attractive option for OBP imple-mentation. However, SRAM-FPGAs are sen-sitive to radiation effects, among which single event upsets (SEUs) are important as they can lead to data corruption and system failure. This paper studies the fault tolerance capabili-ty of a SRAM-FPGA implemented Viterbi de-coder to SEUs on the user memory. Analysis and fault injection experiments are conducted to verify that over 97％ of the SEUs on user memory would not lead to output errors. To achieve a better reliability, selective protection schemes are then proposed to further improve the reliability of the decoder to SEUs on user memory with very small overhead. Although the results are obtained for a specific FPGA implementation, the developed reliability esti-mation model and the general conclusions still hold for other implementations.