Evaluating reliability through soft error triggered exceptions at ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessor

Proceeding of: 32th European Symposium on Reliability of Electron Devices, Failure Physics and Analysis (ESREF 2021), Bourdeaux, France, October 4th to 8th, 2021 (Virtual conference)ARM Cortex-A9 is a high-end microprocessor present in multiple programmable System-on-Chip that is used in many application fields, including those with high reliability requirements. This work aims to understand better the behaviour of a high-end microprocessor in a harsh environment through the analysis, evaluation, and classification of exceptions. Exceptions triggered by radiation effects may end up in an unresponsive state of the microprocessor which is undesirable in high reliability scenarios. Experimental results of both fault injection and irradiation presented in this work provide an extensive analysis of the exceptions and their relationship with the executed code, the usage of operating systems and microprocessor architecture.This work has been supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under project ID2019-106455GB-C21 and by the Community of Madrid under project no. 49.520608.9.18