Modeling Soft Error Propagation in Near-Threshold Combinational Circuits Using Neural Networks

Abstract

With CMOS technology down-scaling, an assuring approach to reduce the power consumption of VLSI designs is Near-Threshold Computing (NTC). However, lowering the supply voltage continuously, exacerbates reliability challenges in modern CMOS logics due to creation of soft errors introduced by single event transients (SETs). In this work, we presented a fast-yet-accurate neural network based model to calculate soft error rate (SER) in circuits in the near-threshold voltage domain. Multi-Layer perceptron (MLP) and recurrent neural network (RNN) used for modeling each gate of a given library. The training data set includes injected SET samples, expected outputs and parameters of each gate. Finally, the propagation of faults in the investigated circuits is calculated using our proposed method. On average, experimental results show that we can estimate soft error rate 10-20 times faster in comparison to HSPICE simulation, with less than 0.1% accuracy loss.