On Derating Soft Error Probability Based on Strength Filtering

— Soft errors caused by ionizing radiation have emerged as a major concern for current generation of CMOS technologies and the trend is expected to get worse. A significant fraction of soft errors in semiconductor has been reported to never lead to a system failure. System level soft-error rate (SER) analysis shows that soft-error in internal circuit nodes frequently fail to propagate to an observable point due to Boolean filtering and latching window filtering. A previous study shows that when soft-error is viewed as an analog signal distortion rather than a digital error, it often disappears during signal propagation due to error signal attenuation. This has been termed as electrical filtering. Electrical filtering in system level soft-error rate analysis is expensive because it involves circuit level simulation. In this paper, we present an electrical filtering technique that treats soft-errors as digital errors, but uses analog strengths to decide whether such errors can pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: IOLTS
• Authors: Alodeep Sanyal, Sandip Kundu
• Keywords: IOLTS 2007, Level Soft-error Rate, Soft Errors, Soft-error Rate Analysis, Software Engineering