Soft Error Mitigation in a Real-Time Control System Through Hardware Protection on an SRAM-Based FPGA

Robotics and automation systems requires a design to handle transient faults that can lead to financial loss, physical damage, or equipment failure. Non-ionizing radiation is a common source of such faults in transistor-based devices. SRAMbased FPGAs provide flexibility for embedded designs using soft processors. This work presents a real-time temperature control system implemented on a MicroBlaze soft-core processor within a Xilinx Artix-7 XC7A100T FPGA, deployed on the Nexys A7100T board. Robustness against Single Event Upsets (SEUs) is evaluated through fault injection on three PI controller implementations: software-based, hardware IP core, and a triplicated TMR design. FreeRTOS manages scheduling, data acquisition, and control signal generation. MATLAB simulations serve as a baseline to validate and compare performance and reliability across the three approaches.