Orbital remote sensing instruments and systems can benefit from high performance, adaptable components. Field programmable SRAM-based gate arrays (FPGAs) are usually the chosen platform for real-time reconfigurable computing. This technology is driven by the commercial sector, so devices intended for the space environment must be adapted from commercial products. Total ionizing dose (TID), heavy ion and proton characterization have been performed on Virtex FPGAs fabricated on epitaxial silicon to evaluate the on-orbit radiation performance expected for this technology. The dominant risk is Single Event Upset (SEU), so upset detection and mitigation schemes have also been tested to demonstrate the improvement in the device upset sensitivity and the system consequence of upsets.
