Evaluation of neutron-induced soft error effects on CPUs in automotive microcontrollers

In this study, four types of microcontrollers (MCUs) operating under actual operating conditions, in which MCUs are regularly reset, are irradiated with white and quasi-monoenergetic neutron beams using our newly developed dynamic irradiation test environment. The results of the irradiation tests have good agreement, and show that neutron-induced soft error rates of the MCUs are almost the same, and are within the range of 0.1 to 0.2 FIT. Using the acquired data, the correlation between the characteristics of the running software and the number of soft errors are also analyzed.