Analysis of sensitive blocks of soft errors in the Xilinx Zynq-7000 System-on-Chip

In this work, soft error sensitivities of three hardware blocks of Xilinx Zynq-7000 System-on-Chip (SoC) were investigated, including processor register, direct memory access (DMA) and Quad-SPI controller. The soft error experiments were performed by using Americium-241 alpha radiation source and the different error types were observed. In order to further identify the sensitive locations of hardware blocks under irradiation experiments, software fault injection tool based on Xilinx Zynq-7000 System-on-Chip was developed. The sensitive locations of hardware blocks were detected by a large number of fault injection experiments.