Fast and low-cost soft error testing of a COTS microcontroller with alpha particle source

Assessing electronic systems regarding ionizing radiation is often costly and requires complex facilities capable of generating the ionizing radiation, and highly qualified human resources to fulfill all the requirements for the radiation tests. This work proposes a fast and low-cost setup to evaluate soft errors on digital programmable systems owing to Single Event Effects caused by ionizing radiation. Alpha particle sources allows to test these systems on a fast and simple procedure, with the advantage of evaluating also the system's sensitivity to ionizing radiation.