Understanding Single Event Upsets in Electronics

Single Event Upset (SEU) or Single Event Effect (SEE) is a space and terrestrial effect that, despite the system may have passed all quality-related testing and verifications, the system can still experience random faults that are typically recovered after reset or power cycle.

First, you need to answer how much pain it would cause if your application fails. A more solid pictorial example is as follows.

• Imagine the AI-powered robotic arm wildly rotates its arm and destroys the assembly line
• An autonomous driving vehicle failed to recognize the pedestrian on the crosswalk and didn't stop
• The accelerated trading platform buys at full speed while the marketing crashes

The question is not if this will happen but when and how often it will happen.
Of course, this is an unavoidable topic if you're already bound by safety standards like ISO26262, IEC61508 or your customer has already asked you about FIT.

Real World Examples

To drive the points home, the following hyperlinked topics provide lessons learned that already cost millions of dollars and/or lifes.

BBC special on SEU is to blame for your electronic woes - Mr. Gate is vindicated of all the blue screens~

Google Engineer manhandled SEU

The tragedy of…