Analysis of Proton-induced Single Event Effect in the On-Chip Memory of Embedded Processor

Embedded processors had been established as common components in modern systems. Usually, they are provided with different types and hierarchical levels of memory, some of them integrated into the same chip (on-chip memory). Due to the high density of transistors, memories are known to be particularly sensitive to soft errors. Soft errors afflicting memories can manifest in various forms besides traditional single-bit value corruption. In this paper, a comprehensive description of radiation-induced effects detected in the SRAM on-chip memory of an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore during a proton-beam test is performed. The experimental setup, data acquisition methodology, and observed effects are reported in detail including a cross-section for different energies. Fault models for system-level reliability evaluation are proposed, complete with their distribution. Finally, the proposed fault models are used in fault injection campaigns on a software benchmark suite and results are discussed.