Discusses features and drawbacks of reconfigurability methods for FPGAs, focused on aerospace applications. Explains how radiation from space causes soft errors in FPGAs and how to mitigate them. Enables readers to qualify the target application on FPGA under radiation and by fault injection

Fault-tolerance in integrated circuits is not an exclusive concern regarding space designers or highly-reliable application engineers. Rather, designers of next generation products must cope with reduced margin noises due to technological advances. The continuous evolution of the fabrication technology process of semiconductor components, in terms of transistor geometry shrinking, power supply, speed, and logic density, has significantly reduced the reliability of very deep submicron integrated circuits, in face of the various internal and external sources of noise.