Developing Benchmarks for Radiation Testing of Microcontroller Arithmetic Units Using ATPG

Abstract

Reliability-focused benchmarks are used to test systems in harsh operating conditions, including space and terrestrial radiation environment. The sensitivity to single-event effects of a microprocessor in a radiation environment depends on the set of input vectors used at the time of testing due to logical masking. This article analyzes the impact of the input test set on the cross section of the microprocessor and proposes a mechanism to derive a high-quality input test set using automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) for radiation testing of microprocessor's arithmetic and logical units.