Single Event Effects Analysis to Improve the System Safety and Fault Tolerance

Single Event Effects analysis focuses on the anomalies in electronics components due to cosmic radiations and their impact on the systems. This paper demonstrates how to systematically analyze the affected components, its adverse effects on the system and their mitigations. This paper also discusses the best approach to improve system safety by implementing a fault-tolerant system design and presents a case study. Single Event Effect (SEE) analysis and the implementation of required mitigation techniques are important in any safety-critical system design. It is always challenging to obtain the right component data and validate it. Very limited test data is readily available.Best-practice approaches for implementing hazard mitigations are presented in this paper. After performing the required SEE calculations, hard and soft errors are accounted into the system safety assessment. Non-compliances will be evident at this stage, and potential solutions are proposed to make the system more fault-tolerant. This paper presents a case study on the subject. The safety assessment should consider SEE impact on the identified failure conditions at the very initial design stage. The safety derived requirements should flow down to lower level design (hardware/software) which helps in proper selection of components considering the radiation impact and the in-build mitigation features like ECC. Also, software design should ensure the robustness from SEE impact with mitigations such as periodic refresh of the safety critical data, Parity checks, CRC and dissimilar algorithms for redundant designs.