Today’s VLSI devices are neither designed nor manufactured for space applications in which single event effects (SEE) issues are common. In addition, very little information about the internal schematic and usually nothing about the layout or netlist is available. Thus, they are practically black boxes for satellite manufacturers. On the other hand, such devices are crucial in driving the performance of spacecraft, especially smaller satellites. The only way to efficiently manage SEE in VLSI devices is to localize sensitive areas of the die, analyze the regions of interest, study potential mitigation techniques, and evaluate their efficiency. For the first time, all these activities can be performed using the same tool with a single test setup that enables a very efficient iterative process that reduce the evaluation time from months to days. In this paper, we will present the integration of a pulsed laser for SEE study into a laser probing, laser stimulation, and emission microscope system. Use of this system will be demonstrated on a commercial 8 bit microcontroller.

Understanding the organization of memory is a mandatory first step in various fields of applications such as failure analysis, defect localization, qualification and testing of space electronics, and security evaluation. For the last category, localization of specific addresses may be used for content estimation or encryption key recovery, with several techniques being reported for this task. In this paper, we discuss the application of laser probing for descrambling memory embedded in 8 bits microcontrollers designed and manufactured by different companies in various technology nodes.

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