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

The growing impact of radiation-induced software errors highlights the necessity of systematic ground-based irradiation experiments. In this study, we evaluate a representative COTS SoC with pulsed-laser fault injection and a custom Linux-kernel framework to trace operating-system–level SEU propagation.Our analysis shows how SEUs cause OS crashes and informs OS-level radiation hardening. Propagation-chain analysis reveals how cache data corruption triggers kernel-level failures through memory management and exception handling. An LLVM-based hardening scheme reduces SEFI incidence, eliminates invalid-address faults, and increases the share of fault-free runs. This study provides practical evidence and design guidance for radiation-tolerant kernels in space systems and preliminary control-flow checks and redundancy further improve reliability.