Soft Error Failure Rate Research Articles

Application specified soft-error failure rate analysis using sequential equivalence checking techniques

Soft errors have become a critical challenge as a result of technology scaling. Existing circuit-hardening techniques are commonly associated with prohibitive overhead of performance, area, and power. However, evaluating the influence of soft errors in Flip-Flops (FFs) on the failure of circuit is a difficult verification problem. Here, we proposed a novel flip-flop soft-error failure rate analysis methodology using a formal method with respect to application behaviors. Approach and optimization techniques to implement the proposed methodology based on the given formula using Sequential Equivalence Checking (SEC) are introduced. The proposed method combines the advantage of formal technique-based approaches in completeness and the advantage of application behaviors in accuracy to differentiate vulnerability of components. As a result, the FFs in a circuit are sorted by their failure rates, and designers can use this information to perform optimal hardening of selected sequential components against soft errors. Experimental results of an implementation of a SpaceWire end node and the largest ISCAS'89 benchmark sequential circuits indicate the feasibility and potential scalability of our approach. A case study on an instruction decoder of a practical 32-bit microprocessor demonstrates the applicability of our method.

A proposed DG-FinFET based SRAM cell design with RadHard capabilities

The radiation induced soft errors have become one of the most important and challenging failure mechanisms in modern electronic devices. This paper proposes a new circuit level hardening technique for reduction of soft error failure rate in DG-FinFET (double gate FinFET) based static random access memory (SRAM). Analysis for 32 nm and 45 nm technology nodes is carried out. It is inferred from the paper that the proposed SRAM cell outperforms over DICE latch in terms of fault tolerance of external data and control lines, power dissipation and fast recovery when exposed to radiation for both the technology nodes. This is primarily due to the addition of extra transistors used to neutralize the effect of single event upset without affecting normal operations. Transistor count increase the area and write delay by 7% and 20% respectively over that of DICE latch. While read delay decreases by 14% for the proposed SRAM cell.

ReStore: Symptom-Based Soft Error Detection in Microprocessors

Device scaling and large-scale integration have led to growing concerns about soft errors in microprocessors. To date, in all but the most demanding applications, implementing parity and ECC for caches and other large, regular SRAM structures have been sufficient to stem the growing soft error tide. This will not be the case for long and questions remain as to the best way to detect and recover from soft errors in the remainder of the processor - in particular, the less structured execution core. In this work, we propose the ReStore architecture, which leverages existing performance enhancing checkpointing hardware to recover from soft error events in a low cost fashion. Error detection in the ReStore architecture is novel: symptoms that hint at the presence of soft errors trigger restoration of a previous checkpoint. Example symptoms include exceptions, control flow misspeculations, and cache or translation look-aside buffer misses. Compared to conventional soft error detection via full replication, the ReStore framework incurs little overhead, but sacrifices some amount of error coverage. These attributes make it an ideal means to provide very cost effective error coverage for processor applications that can tolerate a nonzero, but small, soft error failure rate. Our evaluation of an example ReStore implementation exhibits a 2times increase in MTBF (mean time between failures) over a standard pipeline with minimal hardware and performance overheads. The MTBF increases by 20times if ReStore is coupled with protection for certain particularly vulnerable pipeline structures

Gate sizing to radiation harden combinational logic

A gate-level radiation hardening technique for cost-effective reduction of the soft error failure rate in combinational logic circuits is described. The key idea is to exploit the asymmetric logical masking probabilities of gates, hardening gates that have the lowest logical masking probability to achieve cost-effective tradeoffs between overhead and soft error failure rate reduction. The asymmetry in the logical masking probabilities at a gate is leveraged by decoupling the physical from the logical (Boolean) aspects of soft error susceptibility of the gate. Gates are hardened to single-event upsets (SEUs) with specified worst case characteristics in increasing order of their logical masking probability, thereby maximizing the reduction in the soft error failure rate for specified overhead costs (area, power, and delay). Gate sizing for radiation hardening uses a novel gate (transistor) sizing technique that is both efficient and accurate. A full set of experimental results for process technologies ranging from 180 to 70 nm demonstrates the cost-effective tradeoffs that can be achieved. On average, the proposed technique has a radiation hardening overhead of 38.3%, 27.1%, and 3.8% in area, power, and delay for worst case SEUs across the four process technologies.

Flash Memory Under Cosmic and Alpha Irradiation

Neutron and proton irradiation to simulate cosmic ray jeopardy were used to establish that NOR Flash memory (conventional floating polySi gate or ONO floating gate MirrorBit) soft error failure rate (cross section) is 3-5 orders of magnitude better than SRAM. Flash memory soft error rate for a given dose of alpha particle irradiation is much less than for the same dose from simulated cosmic rays.