Physical Fault Injection and Monitoring Methods for Programmable Devices

A method of detecting faults for evaluating the fault cross section of any field programmable gate array (FPGA) was developed and is described in the thesis. The incidence of single event effects in FPGAs was studied for different probe particles (proton, neutron, gamma) using this method. The existing accelerator infrastructure of the Nuclear Physics Institute in Rez was supplemented by more sensitive beam monitoring system to ensure that the tests are done under well defined beam conditions. The bit cross section of single event effects was measured for different types of configuration memories, clock signal phase and beam energies and intensities. The extended infrastructure served also for radiation testing of components which are planned to be used in the new Inner Tracking System (ITS) detector of the ALICE experiment and for selecting optimal fault mitigation techniques used for securing the design of the FPGA-based ITS readout unit against faults induced by ionizing radiation.