Susceptibility Analysis of LEON3 Embedded Processor against Multiple Event Transients and Upsets

This paper presents an analysis of the effects and propagations of different faults such as Single Event Transient (SET), Multiple Event Transients (MET), Single Event Upset (SEU) and Multiple Bit Upsets (MBU) by simulation-based fault injection into Areoflex Gaisler LEON3 processor which is a 32 bit synthesizable processor based on SPARC V8 architecture. LEON3 is designed for ground-based applications. This investigation is done by injecting nearly 11200 transient faults into different components of LEON3 including flip-flops, registers, register-file and cache memories. The behavior of LEON3 processor against injected faults is reported. Besides, it is shown that nearly 52.83% of SEUs are overwritten, 31.74% of SEUs are latent and finally 15.43% of them are reported as failure while 44.74% of MBUs are overwritten, 38.42% of them are latent and 16.84 of these kind of faults are failed. Also, 98.03% of SETs are overwritten, 0.6% of them are latent and 1.36% of SETs are reported as failures. Finally, the effects of METs are as follows: 96.71% for overwritten faults, 1.15% for latent and 2.14% for failure. Moreover, integer unit and multiplier unit are the most susceptible components against single and multiple faults respectively.