Coupling induced soft error mechanisms in nanoscale CMOS technologies

Abstract

Due to scaling induced effects, CMOS circuits become increasingly more sensitive to transient pulses caused by single event (SE) particles. Researchers mostly considered SE transients as the main cause for combinational logic (CL) related radiation-induced soft errors. However, for high-reliability applications such as avionics, military and medical applications, additional sources such as SE induced soft delays, clock jitters, false clock pulses and crosstalk effects need to be included in soft-error reliability analysis. As technologies advance, coupling effects among interconnects increasingly cause SE transients to contaminate electronically unrelated circuit paths, which can in turn increase the "SE susceptibility" of CMOS circuits. This work focuses on such coupling induced soft error mechanisms in CL, namely the SE crosstalk noise and delay effects. An attempt has been made to compare SE crosstalk noise and SE transient effects, and crosstalk contribution to soft error rate has been examined. In addition, the SE induced coupling delay effect has been studied and compared to radiation induced soft delay effect for various technologies. Results show that, in newer technologies, the SE coupling delay becomes quite comparable to soft delay effect, although caused indirectly by cross-coupling effects. In comparisons, the distributed nature of interconnects has been taken into account and results are demonstrated using HSPICE simulations with interconnect and device parameters derived in 130, 90 and 65 nm technologies.