Comparison of Neutron Radiation Testing Approaches for a Complex SoC

Commercial systems-on-a-chip (SoC) have grown more abundant in recent years, including in space applications. This has led to the need to test SoCs in radiation environments, which is difficult due to their inherent complexity. In this work, we present two complementary approaches to testing digital SoC devices—a bare metal approach and an operating system-based approach—and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Experimental data collected using these two methods in September 2021 from the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) on the Xilinx UltraScale+ MPSoC is presented and discussed.