Assessing the Robustness of Real-Time Operating System on Soft Processor against Multiple Bit Upset

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are becoming increasingly important for space applications due to their high flexibility, performance, and complexity. In particular, soft-core processors like Xilinx Microblaze are commonly implemented using the programmable logic of FPGAs, making them suitable for embedded applications. However, the netlist of soft microprocessors can be corrupted by the effects of radiation-induced soft errors, in particular Single-Event Effects (SEUs) [1--5]. This work presents a detailed evaluation of the impact of radiation-induced architectural faults affecting the application benchmarks running on the FreeRTOS of the Microblaze embedded soft processor. The effect of Multiple Bits Upsets (MBU) faults during the execution of different software applications on FreeRTOS supported by Microblaze implemented on Zynq-7020 FPGA was evaluated, and the outcome of the software application was investigated. Please, notice that the developed platform is targeting only hardware faults and their impact on the execution of the software running in the operating system.