Early Radiation-Induced Soft-Error Assessment of Arm Cortex-M SoCs Through Fault Injection

This work investigates the impact of neutron and heavy ion radiation-induced soft errors on Arm Cortex-M Systems-on-Chip and proposes a fault injection methodology designed for the early assessment of these effects on the embedded processors. Our methodology is then employed to assess the effectiveness of software design exploration and implementing fault tolerance techniques. We connect heavy ion and neutron radiation experiments and emulate fault injections for applications running on these resource-constrained low-cost processors. Our case studies include benchmark scenarios with bare-metal applications and the FreeRTOS operating system, tailored for deployment in small satellite missions. Results show that our proposed methodology presents reliability curves that align with those obtained from the radiation experiments.