Methodology and tools for estimating processors sensitivity to soft errors induced by radiations

Energetic particles present in space and in the Earth’s atmosphere may produce transient and permanent degradations on integrated circuits. This may lead to critical faults in systems on-board satellites, aircrafts and even in applications operating at ground level such as automotive, medical, etc..... In this paper is presented, a methodology and the required tools for estimating the vulnerability of applications running on microprocessors with respect to bit-flip errors resulting from Single Event Upsets, also called soft errors. The proposed method allows estimating the sensitivity to this effect for any kind of processor running target application programs. Experimental and computational results of SEU tests performed on various complex processors by means of different test systems, as well as a fault emulation approach for predicting error rate will be presented and compared validating the accuracy of the proposed predictive error-rate approach.