The objectives, instrumentation, methods and data leading up to launch of the NASA Living With a Star (LWS) Space Environment Testbed (SET) payload onboard the Air Force Research Laboratory ...Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX) spacecraft are described. The experiments characterize the space radiation environment and how it affects hardware performance. The payload consists of a compact space weather instrument and a carrier containing four board experiments.
A software technique is presented to protect commercial multi-core microprocessors against radiation-induced soft errors. Important time overheads associated with conventional software redundancy ...techniques limit the feasibility of advanced critical electronic systems. In our approach, redundant bare-metal threads are used, so that critical computation is distributed over the different micro-processor cores. In doing so, software redundancy can be applied to commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) micro-processors without incurring high-performance penalties. The proposed technique was evaluated using a low-cost single board computer (SBC) Raspberry Pi 4 (RPI4) under neutron irradiation. The results showed that the redundant multi-threading (RMT) versions detected and recovered all the silent data corruption (SDC) events, and only increased HANG sensitivity with respect to the unhardened original versions. In addition, higher mean work-to-failure (MWTF) estimations are achieved with our bare-metal technique than with the state-of-the-art bare-metal software-based techniques that only implement temporal redundancy.
Bulk Built-In Current Sensors (bbicss) were introduced to detect the anomalous transient currents induced in the bulk of integrated circuits when hit by ionizing particles. To date, the experimental ...testing of only one bbics architecture was reported in the scientific bibliography. It reports an unexpected weakness in its ability to monitor nmos transistors. Based on experimental measures, we propose an explanation of this weakness and also the use of triple-well cmos to offset it. Further, we introduce a new bbics architecture well suited for triple-well that offers high detection sensitivity and low area overhead.
Hardware-implemented machine learning algorithms are finding their way in various domains, including safety-critical applications. This has demanded these algorithms to perform correctly even in ...harsh environmental conditions, such as in avionics altitudes. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is an important Machine Learning that has been target of hardware implementation in recent years. This is the first work to asses both Binary and Multiclass SVMs under thermal neutron radiation, a type of particle noticeably present in high altitudes. A fault injection campaign along with a radiation test with the D50 thermal neutron source, at the Intitut Laue-Languevin, has been performed. The results show a high intrinsic fault tolerance for both varieties of the SVM algorithm, especially for the Multiclass SVM.
•First test of SVMs under thermal neutron radiation•Both Binary and Multiclass SVM shown to have an intrinsic fault tolerance•Fault tolerance of SVMs tested though radiation campaign and fault injection•Tests conducted using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components
•A strategy to design BBICS with optimal fault detection sensitivity is proposed.•An asymmetry in the flipping ability of the sensor’s latch is introduced.•Low and high threshold voltage transistors ...are used to increase sensitivity.•No redesign of the standard cells in CMOS 65-nm is required.
Bulk Built-In Current Sensors (BBICSs) are able to detect anomalous transient currents induced in the bulk of integrated circuits when hit by ionizing particles. This paper presents a new strategy to design BBICSs with optimal transient-fault detection sensitivity while keeping low both area and power overheads. The approach allows increasing the detection sensitivity by setting an asymmetry in the flipping ability of the sensor’s latch. In addition, we introduce a mechanism to tune the delay of the bulk access transistors that improves even more the BBICS detection sensitivity. The proposed design strategy offers a good compromise between fault detection sensitivity and power consumption; moreover it makes feasible the use of several CMOS processes.
This work presents a novel circuit for detecting transient faults in combinational and sequential logic. The detection mechanism features a built-in current sensor connected to the bulks of the ...monitored logic. The proposed circuit was optimized in terms of power consumption and enhanced with low-power sleep-mode. In addition, a calibration method for bulk built-in current sensors is presented. Overhead results indicate an increase of only 15% in power consumption which represents an improvement of factor 7 compared to similar existing sensors.
This study investigates the impacts of radiation-induced soft errors on system-on-chips with Arm Cortex-M microprocessors. We evaluate two Cortex-M microprocessors running two applications. Regarding ...their use in mission-critical and safety-critical applications, we explore multiple scenarios, considering single, parallel, and periodic tasks, bare-metal and light operating system execution, and caches enabled and disabled. We tested two microprocessor devices under 14 MeV neutrons to draw a preliminary reliability analysis, measuring performance and reliability metrics under radiation-induced soft errors. Finally, we discuss trade-offs between performance and reliability, providing insights into how the Arm Cortex-M microprocessor series performs in harsh environments. Results can aid designers in developing more efficient and reliable fault tolerance techniques to enable such microprocessors to operate in aerospace applications.
This article assesses, for the first time, a body/bulk built-in current sensor (BBICS) in a CMOS 65-nm test chip under thermal neutron, high-energy neutron, and laser radiation. Experimental results ...suggest that the on-chip current sensor is effective to detect transient faults in different case-study subcircuits of the chip exposed to the accelerated radiation effects, opening prospects for embedding this type of sensor in reliable, secure, and low-power integrated circuit applications.
The use of deeper-submicron technologies in integrated circuits worsens the effects of transient faults. In fact, the transient-fault durations become as important as the clock periods of synchronous ...circuits. Electronic systems are thus more vulnerable to failure situations. Nevertheless, this paper shows innovatively that such a worse scenario does not happen in asynchronous circuits. This additional novel benefit pushes on the asynchronous design as a better alternative to mitigate transient faults in deep-submicron technology-based circuits.
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