Emulation-Based Analysis of Multiple Cell Upsets in LEON3 SDRAM: A Workload-Dependent Vulnerability Study

Abstract

The reliability of embedded processors in safety- and mission-critical domains is increasingly threatened by radiation-induced soft errors, particularly multiple-cell upsets (MCUs) that simultaneously corrupt adjacent cells in external SDRAM. While prior studies on the LEON3 processor have largely focused on single-event upsets (SEUs) in internal SRAM structures, they overlook MCU effects in off-chip SDRAM, a critical gap that limits fault coverage and compromises system-level reliability assessment in modern high-density embedded systems. This paper presents an SDRAM-based fault injection framework using FPGA emulation to evaluate the impact of MCUs on the LEON3 soft-core processor, with faults directly injected into the external memory subsystem where data corruptions can rapidly propagate into system-level failures. The methodology injects spatially correlated two-bit MCUs directly into SDRAM during realistic workload execution. Three architecturally diverse benchmarks were analyzed, each representing a distinct computational workload: a numerical (matrix multiplication), signal-processing (FFT), and a cryptographic (AES-128 encryption) application, chosen to capture arithmetic-intensive, iterative, and control-intensive execution profiles, respectively. The results reveal a distinct workload-dependent vulnerability profile. Matrix multiplication exhibited >99.99% fault activation, with outcomes overwhelmingly dominated by data store errors. FFT showed >97% activation in steady-state execution, following an initial phase sensitive to alignment and data access exceptions. AES displayed 88.12% non-propagating faults, primarily due to injections in inactive memory regions, but remained exposed to critical memory access violations and control-flow exceptions that enable fault-based cryptanalysis. These findings demonstrate that SEU-only models severely underestimate real-world MCU risks and underscore the necessity of selective, workload-aware fault-tolerance strategies: lightweight ECC for cryptographic data structures, alignment monitoring for signal processing, and algorithm-based fault tolerance (ABFT) for numerical kernels. This work provides actionable insights for hardening LEON3-based systems against emerging multi-bit threats in radiation-rich and adversarial environments.