Studying the degradation of propagation delay on FPGAs at the European XFEL

Lanzieri, LeandroLeandroLanzieriButkowski, LukaszLukaszButkowskiKral, JiriJiriKralFey, GörschwinGörschwinFeySchlarb, HolgerHolgerSchlarbSchmidt, Thomas C.Thomas C.Schmidt2025-01-072025-01-072024-08Proceedings - 27th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design, DSD 2024: 65-72979-8-3503-8038-5979-8-3503-8039-2https://tore.tuhh.de/handle/11420/52939An increasing number of unhardened commercial-off-the-shelf embedded devices are deployed under harsh operating conditions and in highly-dependable systems. Due to the mechanisms of hardware degradation that affect these devices, ageing detection and monitoring are crucial to prevent critical failures. In this paper, we empirically study the propagation delay of 298 naturally-aged FPGA devices that are deployed in the European XFEL particle accelerator. Based on in-field measurements, we find that operational devices show significantly slower switching frequencies than unused chips, and that increased gamma and neutron radiation doses correlate with increased hardware degradation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the feasibility of developing machine learning models that estimate the switching frequencies of the devices based on historical and environmental data.enEmbedded hardware | FPGA | hardware degradationTechnology::600: TechnologyStudying the degradation of propagation delay on FPGAs at the European XFELConference Paper10.1109/DSD64264.2024.00018Conference Paper