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PhD students Andrew Wilson and Hayden Cook, along with Professor Jeff Goeders, attended the 2023 International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and Workshop on Security for Custom Computing Machines (SCCM). Andrew presented his paper, “Post-Radiation Fault Analysis of a High Reliability FPGA Linux SoC”, co-authored by BYU students Nate Baker, Ethan Campbell, and Jackson Sahleen and Professor Mike Wirthlin. Professor Goeders co-organized the SCCM workshop, where Hayden gave a presentation titled “Cloning the Unclonable: Physically Cloning an FPGA RO PUF”.

Researchers from the CCL traveled to the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) to verify the reliability of various computer reliability methodologies. The experiments performed at LANSCE were a testing methodologies for multicore SoC (System-on-a-Chip), an improved Linux PCAP scrubber, radiation hardened softcore processors, a DDR memory module and attempting to generate bit upsets data for FRAM chips continually performing reads and writes. The image on the left are the experiments exposed to the neutron radiation beam and on the right are researchers involved.

PhD student Hayden Cook, along with Professor Jeff Goeders, virtually attended the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT) (FPT). Hayden presented his paper, “Cloning the Unclonable: Physically Cloning an FPGA Ring-Oscillator PUF”, co-authored by BYU students Jonathan Thompson and Zephram Tripp and professor Jeffrey Goeders as well as retired professor Brad Hutchings. This paper ended up winning FPT’s best paper award.

Researchers from the CCL and Sandia National Laboratory traveled to the Little Mountain Test Facility in Ogden, Utah to use the LINAC for computer reliability testing. An SRAM chip (a commonly used component in bigger devices) was irradiated at varying intensities and durations to characterize its response. The people in the image on the left are (from left to right) Dolores Black (SNL), Jeff Black (SNL), Wesley Stirk (CCL), Roy Cuoco (SNL), Mike Wirthlin (CCL), and Jeff Goeders (CCL).

Andrew Keller successfully defended his PhD dissertation, “Partial Circuit Replication for Masking and Detecting Soft Errors in SRAM-Based FPGAs”. Andrew is now starting a full-time job at L3Harris in Salt Lake City.

Students, faculty, and their spouses, got together for a party to celebrate the end of a successful summer of research. Lots of fun was had chatting and getting to know each other with plenty of cheeseburgers, snacks and ice cream.

Students from the CCL traveled to the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) to perform a variety of experiments related to computer reliability. Experiments included testing of a Linux-based PCAP scrubber, radiation hardened softcore processors, SoC (System-on-a-Chip) radiation testing methodologies, and FPGA fabric characterization under radiation. The image on the left shows the experiment boards lined up for the neutron radiation beam. The image on the right shows the participating students on the first day of the experiments (and the first day of school).

Hayden Cook (Master’s student) gave a remote presentation at the 30th International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications on “Using Novel Configuration Techniques for Accelerated FPGA Aging”.

Matthew Ashcraft (PhD student) travelled to Tianjin, China to present his paper at the 2019 International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology on “Synchronizing On-Chip Software and Hardware Traces for HLS-Accelerated Programs,” building on the work presented at the previous years conference.

Students journeyed to ChipIr equipt with several experiments and a desire to discover the unknown. Like LANSCE, ChipIr also provides an accelerated neutron source that is similar to neutron radiation found in the Earth’s atmosphere. A half dozen different boards were included in this test. Experiments covered novel scrubber techniques, structrual redundancy on a RISC-V processor, multi-cell upset detection on the newer FPGA architectures, the use of the Soft Error Mitigation (SEM) Core, and the use of partial circuit replication techniques on academic and commercial FPGA-based networking applications. Experiments were staffed around the clock; students back at BYU remoted into the experiments while those attending prepaired for the next day. A breif visit was made to the nearby historic town of Abingdon for dinner one eveing, and Oxford 1st ward was attended on Sunday, the second to last day.