Characterisation of AMD Versal FPGA Transceivers Under Heavy-Ion Radiation

The AMD Versal FPGA family includes the latest generation of radiation-tolerant FPGAs from AMD (XQRVC1902 and XQRVE2302), built on a 7-nm FinFET process. These provide unparalleled capabilities for space-qualified devices, featuring up to 44 integrated GTY high-speed transceivers that support lane speeds of 26.5 Gbit/s. These attributes make Versal ideal for implementing spacecraft communication protocols such as SpaceFibre, an advanced spacecraft on-board data-handling network technology that has been operating in space since 2021. This paper provides the results of a recent heavy-ion radiation campaign carried out in collaboration between STAR-Dundee and AMD. The campaign aimed to characterise the Versal transceivers under radiation and assessing the improvements in link reliability provided by the use of a robust protocol such as SpaceFibre. The results demonstrate that, as expected, different elements of the transceiver blocks are sensitive to radiation. Radiation-induced events disrupt the normal operation of communication protocols implemented using the high-speed transceivers. However, the results indicate that SpaceFibre automatically mitigates the majority of radiation-induced events affecting the transceivers, yielding a three order-of-magnitude reduction in the observed error rate, without requiring user intervention. Additionally, the campaign successfully demonstrated, for the first time, a 100 Gbit/s SpaceFibre link operating under radiation, with lanes running at 25 Gbit/s.