Propagation-Chain Analysis of Radiation-Induced Soft Errors in COTS SoCs via Laser Fault Injection

Abstract

The increasing use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system-on-chips (SoCs) in space systems makes the operating-system consequences of radiation-induced soft errors a practical concern. This work applies pulsed-laser fault injection and a Linux-kernel monitoring framework to a representative COTS SoC. Across 55 valid experiments, we classify single-event upset (SEU)-only outcomes and single-event functional interrupts (SEFIs), map their spatial distribution, and analyze three representative propagation chains. The cases show how software-visible corruption can propagate through kernel memory management, scheduling, and exception handling, while the initiating microarchitectural fault location remains inferred. We further evaluate a combined hardening configuration based on the LLVM compiler infrastructure. No invalid-address SEFI was observed in the hardened sample, but scheduling and synchronization failures increased. Selective redundancy imposed modest runtime and code-size overhead. The findings provide an experimentally grounded framework for locating, interpreting, and mitigating operating-system-level soft-error manifestations.