Injection of Space Radiation Errors on Low-power NVM using Generative Deep Learning

Overview & Synopsis

We develop an error model for a Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) device that represents the effects of physical faults experienced in a CubeSat mission in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The CubeSat carries an off-the-shelf low-power Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) chip and runs repeated read/write tests according to a predefined pattern. We compare every memory snapshot received from the satellite with a reference bitmap to identify bit errors. We visually analyze erroneous values distributions in the memory snapshots and we understand that they are frequently distributed according to regular spatial patterns. We define a generative deep learning technique to automatically learn these spatial patterns and to synthetically generate additional error patterns mimicking the observed ones. The model is capable at producing memory errors for general application-level experimentation. Our preliminary validation indicates that when comparing the model output with the data we collect, 0.92 of the generated bit flips correspond to bit flips in the memory snapshots and the model captures 0.91 of the observed bit flips. A comparison of the spatial distribution of bit flips in 10,000 generated error patterns also provides a Wasserstein distance of 0.073, indicating that the two distributions differ by roughly 7% of the maximum possible displacement of their probability masses.