Soft Error Susceptibility Analysis for Sequential Circuit Elements Based on EPPM

Abstract

Due to the reduction in device feature size, transient faults (soft errors) in logic circuits induced by radiations increase dramatically. Many researches have been done in modeling and analyzing the susceptibility of sequential circuit elements caused by soft errors. However, to the best knowledge of the authors, there is no work which has well considerated the feedback characteristics and the multiple clock cycles of sequential circuits. In this paper, we present a new method for evaluating the susceptibility of sequential circuit elements to soft errors. The proposed method uses four Error Propagation Probability Matrixs (EPPMs) to represent the error propagation probability of logic gates and flip-flops in current clock cycle. Based on the predefined matrix union operations, the susceptibility of circuit elements in multiple clock cycles can be evaluated. Experimental results on ISCAS’89 benchmark circuits show that our method is more accurate and efficient than previous methods.