Characterization of a Fault-Tolerant RISC-V System-on-Chip for Space Environments

Abstract

Processing units are sensitive to the harsh radiation conditions present in space applications. Thus, radiation testing is a mandatory step toward high reliability for these systems. Notably, as an emerging processor architecture, RISC-V has attained interest for its utilization in these applications. For this reason, in previous work, we presented a faulttolerant RISC-V System-on-Chip (SoC) with enhanced fault awareness, known as HARV-SoC, to attend to this increasing demand. The SoC includes structures to detect, correct, and report radiation-induced errors. In this work, we characterize HARV-SoC under proton irradiation, enabling the proposition of space applications based on a low-cost and open-source RISC-V solution. We observed and reported the effects of Single Event Effects (SEEs) and Total Ionizing Dose (TID) in the entire SoC, individually evaluating the HARV core, SoC elements, and external memories, with a detailed analysis of error propagation.