Reliability Assessment of Arm Cortex-M Processors under Heavy Ions and Emulated Fault Injection

This paper evaluates radiation-induced software failure detection in embedded processors from the Cortex-M family. Our proposed methodology performs heavy ion irradiation experiments and establishes a connection with emulated fault injection for a benchmark of applications. We experimented on a set of case-studies in bare-metal and with the FreeRTOS operating system with different configurations, tailoring our approach for deployment in small satellite missions. Additionally, we tested a fault tolerance technique for fault detection. Results show coherence between irradiation and fault injection and can help designers build better fault tolerance mechanisms.