Accelerated Nuclear Radiation Effects on the Raspberry Pi 3B+

The Raspberry Pi family of hobbyist, single-board computers are appearing in avionics and space applications - despite not being designed for a radiation environment. Therefore, results of radiation testing are of interest to the radiation community. In this paper, we report results of executing a suite of benchmarks on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ with its ARM Cortex-A53 microprocessor in the accelerated neutron beam at LANSCE during August 2021. The entire 56x85 mm board was exposed while running Linux. Single Event Upsets, Single Event Functional Interrupts, HANGS, and Linux operating system errors were recorded along with the attendant neutron fluence. Cross sections are computed and converted to error rates. Due to frequent crashes, tests were run for one minute then terminated and a new test begun. Unsuccessful tests were detected, and power was cycled to recover initial system state. While the Linux operating system afforded several advantages in testing, it introduces difficult-to-diagnose failures and a perplexing problem on Raspberry Pi with accounting for wall-clock time.