A non-invasive system for the measurement of the robustness of microprocessor-type architectures against radiation-induced soft errors

In critical digital designs such as aerospace or safety equipment, radiation-induced upset events (SEE) can produce adverse effects, so the ability to compare the sensibility of various proposed solutions is desirable. As custom-hardened microprocessor solutions can be very costly, the reliability of various COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) processors can be evaluated, to see if there is a commercially available microprocessor or microprocessor-type IP (Intellectual Property) with adequate robustness for the specific application. Most existing approaches for the measurement of this robustness of the microprocessor involve diverting the program flow and timing to introduce the bit flips via interrupts and embedded handlers added to the application program. In this paper the tool FT-UNSHADES-uP is described, which provides an environment and methodology for the evaluation of the sensitivity of microprocessor architectures, using dynamic runtime fault injection. A case study is presented, where the robustness of a MicroBlaze and Leon3 uP systems executing a simple signal processing task written in C are evaluated and compared. A hardened version of the program where the key variables are protected has also been tested and its contributions to the system robustness have also been evaluated.