AN 866: Mitigating and Debugging Single Event Upsets in Intel® Quartus® Prime Standard Edition

ID 683869
Date 9/28/2021
Public
Document Table of Contents

1.3. Mitigating SEU Effects in Configuration RAM

devices contain error detect CRC (EDCRC) hard blocks. These blocks detect and correct soft errors in CRAM, and are similar to those that protect internal user memory.

Intel FPGAs contain frames of CRAM. The size and number of frames is device specific. The device continually checks the CRAM frames for errors by loading each frame into a data register. The EDCRC block checks the frame for errors.

When the FPGA finds a soft error, the FPGA asserts its CRC_ERROR pin. You can monitor this pin in your system. When your system detects that the FPGA asserted this pin during operation, indicating the FPGA detected a soft error in the configuration RAM, the system can take action to recover from the error. For example, the system can perform a soft reset (after waiting for background scrubbing), reprogram the FPGA, or classify the error as benign and ignore it.

Figure 2. CRAM Frame

To enable error detection, point to Assignments > Device > Device and Pin Options > Error Detection CRC, and turn on error detection settings.