Radiation-Induced Errors in the Software Level of Real-Time Soft Processing System

FPGAs' and programmable hardware's high performance and flexibility have made them a reasonable choice for space-oriented applications, although susceptible to soft errors. This paper proposes a comprehensive analysis of the effects of microarchitectural faults on soft processors due to radiations, identifying the hardware sources of errors and how they propagate to software-level

EuFRATE: European FPGA Radiation-hardened Architecture for Telecommunications

The EuFRATE project aims to research, develop and test radiation-hardening methods for telecommunication payloads deployed for Geostationary-Earth Orbit (GEO) using Commercial-Off-The-Shelf Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). This project is conducted by Argotec Group (Italy) with the collaboration of two partners: Politecnico di Torino (Italy) and Technische Universit¨at Dresden (Germany). The idea of the project focuses on high-performance telecommunication algorithms and the design and implementation strategies for connecting an FPGA device into a robust and efficient cluster of multi-FPGA systems. The radiation-hardening techniques currently under development are addressing both device and cluster levels, with redundant datapaths on multiple devices, comparing the results and isolating fatal errors. This paper introduces the current state of the project’s hardware design description, the composition of the FPGA cluster node, the proposed cluster topology, and the radiation hardening techniques. Intermediate stage experimental results of the FPGA communication layer performance and fault detection techniques are presented. Finally, a wide summary of the project’s impact on the scientific community is provided

Analysis of Single Event Effects on Embedded Processor

The continuous scaling of electronic components has led to the development of high-performance microprocessors which are even suitable for safety-critical applications where radiation-induced errors, such as single event effects (SEEs), are one of the most important reliability issues. This work focuses on the development of a fault injection environment capable of analyzing the impact of errors on the functionality of an ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor embedded within a Zynq-7000 AP-SoC, considering different fault models affecting both the system memory and register resources of the embedded processor. We developed a novel Python-based fault injection platform for the emulation of radiation-induced faults within the AP-SoC hardware resources during the execution of software applications. The fault injection approach is not intrusive, and it does not require modifying the software application under evaluation. The experimental analyses have been performed on a subset of the MiBench benchmark software suite. Fault injection results demonstrate the capability of the developed method and the possibility of evaluating various sets of fault models

On the Reliability of Real-time Operating System on Embedded Soft Processor for Space Applications

The interest of the space industry in Real-Time Operating Systems for achieving stringent real-time requirement is drastically increasing. Among the different available hardware architectures, the solution of RTOS implemented on soft processors embedded in programmable devices is one of the most efficient and flexible solution for the mission deployment. However, radiation-induced failures are a severe concern affecting the reliability of electronic systems in space applications. In this paper, we investigate the impact of radiation-induced architectural faults affecting the reliability of application running on a Xilinx Microblaze embedded soft-processor within FreeRTOS Operating System. We developed a fault model through a proton radiation test, while the effects of the faults are evaluated in terms of Mean Time To Failure and Mean Time To Executions, by a fault injection campaign using detected fault models. Finally, the occurrence and contribution to the error rate of specific MBUs events based on different shapes and sizes are evaluated through dedicated fault injection campaigns

Programmable SEL Test Monitoring System for Radiation Hardness Assurance

In the continued miniaturization of electronic devices, certain advantages in terms of power consumption, performances, and physical area occupation correspond to an increased susceptibility to highly charged radiation particle interactions. Therefore, it is nowadays extremely important to assess Radiation Hardness Assurance (RHA) procedures in order to guarantee that a certain system is suitable to be used in extreme environmental conditions such as deep space. When performing these measurements, the design and development of dedicated fault monitoring systems to be used as support architecture during the radiation tests are heavily time and budget-consuming operations. The present paper describes a programmable Single Event Latch-up (SEL) monitoring system capable of supporting experimenters on the test of several heterogeneous electronic devices ranging from microcontrollers up to individual MOSFETs. The proposed solution has been successfully verified during a heavy-ion radiation test campaign. The experimental results achieved during the radiation test campaigns are described and commented

Proton-induced MBU Effects in Real-time Operating System on Embedded Soft Processor

In this paper, we perform an evaluation of the impact of radiation-induced micro-architectural faults affecting the Microblaze soft-processor running a Real-Time Operating System. Fault injection campaigns with a proton-radiation test fault model are presented

Exploring the Impact of Soft Errors on the Reliability of Real-Time Embedded Operating Systems

The continuous scaling of electronic components has led to the development of high-performance microprocessors that are suitable even for safety-critical applications where radiation-induced errors such as Single Event Effects (SEEs) can have a significant impact on the performance and reliability of the system. This work is dedicated to investigating the reliability of systems based on programmable hardware and Real-time operating Systems (RTOS) in the presence of architectural faults induced by soft errors in the configuration memory of the programmable hardware. We performed a proton radiation test campaigned at PSI radiation facility to identify the fault model affecting the configuration memory of Xilinx Zynq-7020 reconfigurable AP-Soc Device. The identified fault model in terms of SEU and MBU clusters has been used to evaluate the impact of proton-induced faults on applications running within FreeRTOS on a Microblaze soft processor. A Single Event Multiple Upset fault model resulting from a proton test is presented, focusing on characteristics such as shape, size, and frequency of observed cluster of errors. We conduct two fault injection campaigns and analyze the results to assess the effect of cluster size on system reliability. Moreover, we discuss software exceptions caused by faults that can affect the hardware structure of the soft processor

Soft Error Reliability Prediction of SRAM-based FPGA Designs

We developed a tool for the reliability analysis of SEU effects on the configuration memory of Xilinx Zynq SRAM-based FPGAs. A proton radiation test campaign on different TMR layouts demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach