Case Study: Soft Error Rate Analysis in Storage Systems

Soft errors due to cosmic particles are a growing reliability threat for VLSI systems. In this paper the authors analyze the soft error vulnerability of FPGAs used in storage systems. Since the reliability requirements of these high performance storage subsystems are very stringent, the reliability of the FPGA chips used in the design of such systems plays a critical role in the overall system reliability. They validate the projections produced by the analytical model by using field error rates obtained from actual field failure data of a large FPGA-based design used in the Logical Unit Module board of a commercial storage system.