The Effects of Heavy-Ion Induced Single Event Upsets in the MC6809E Microprocessor

Fault injection by heavy-ion radiation from Californium-252 could become a useful method for experimental verification and validation of error handling mechnisms used in computer systems. Heavy ions emitted from Cf-252 have the capacity to cause transient faults and soft errors in integrated circuits. In this paper, results of initial fault injection experiments using the MC6809E 8-bit microprocessor are presented. The purpose of the experiments was to investigate the variation of the error behavior seen on the external buses when the microprocessor chip was irradiated by a Cf-252 source. The variation of the error behavior is imperative for an effective evaluation of error handling mechnisms, e.g. those designed to detect errors caused by a microprocessor. The experiments showed that the errors seen on the external buses of the MC6809E were well spread, both in terms of location and number of bits affected.