Soft error rate estimations of the Kintex-7 FPGA within the ATLAS Liquid Argon (LAr) Calorimeter

This paper summarizes the radiation testing performed on the Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA in an effort to determine if the Kintex-7 can be used within the ATLAS Liquid Argon (LAr) Calorimeter. The Kintex-7 device was tested with wide-spectrum neutrons, protons, heavy-ions, and mixed high-energy hadron environments. The results of these tests were used to estimate the configuration ram and block ram upset rate within the ATLAS LAr. These estimations suggest that the configuration memory will upset at a rate of 1.1× 10−10 upsets/bit/s and the bram memory will upset at a rate of 9.06× 10−11 upsets/bit/s. For the Kintex 7K325 device, this translates to 6.85×10−3 upsets/device/s for configuration memory and 1.49×10−3 for block memory.