Single event transient pulse widths in digital microcircuits

Abstract

The radiation effects community has long known that single event transients in digital microcircuits will have an increasing importance on error rates as device sizes shrink. However separating these errors from static errors in latch cells has often proved difficult. Thus determining both the significance and the nature of these transient errors has not been easy. In this study, by utilizing a latch that is radiation hard at static clock frequencies the errors due to transients could be separated. By separating the transient error rate from the static upset error rate, the pulse structure of the propagating transients was studied using SPICE. The implications of these pulsewidths will also be discussed.