Study of Radiation Tolerant Storage Cells for Digital Systems

Single event upsets (SEUs) are a significant reliability issue in semiconductor devices. Fully Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FDSOI) technologies have been shown to exhibit better SEU performance compared to bulk technologies. This is attributed to the thin Silicon (Si) layer on top of a Buried Oxide (BOX) layer, which allows each transistor to function as an insulated Si island, thus reducing the threat of charge-sharing. Moreover, the small volume of the Si in FDSOI devices results in a reduction of the amount of charge induced by an ion strike. The effects of Total Ionizing Dose (TID) on integrated circuits (ICs) can lead to changes in gate propagation delays, leakage currents, and device functionality. When IC circuits are exposed to ionizing radiation, positive charges accumulate in the gate oxide and field oxide layers, which results in reduced gate control and increased leakage current. TID effects in bulk technologies are usually simpler due to the presence of only one gate oxide layer, but FDSOI technologies have a more complex response to TID effects because of the additional BOX layer. In this research, we aim to address the challenges of developing cost-effective electronics for space applications by bridging the gap between expensive space-qualified components and high-performance commercial technologies. Key research questions involve exploring various radiation-hardening-by-design (RHBD) techniques and their trade-offs, as well as investigating the feasibility of radiation-hardened microcontrollers. The effectiveness of RHBD techniques in mitigating soft errors is well-established. In our study, a test chip was designed using the 22-nm FDSOI process, incorporating multiple RHBD Flip-Flop (FF) chains alongside a conventional FF chain. Three distinct types of ring oscillators (ROs) and a 256 kbit SRAM was also fabricated in the test chip. To evaluate the SEU and TID performance of these designs, we conducted multiple irradiation experiments with alpha particles, heavy ions, and gamma-rays. Alpha particle irradiation tests were carried out at the University of Saskatchewan using an Americium-241 alpha source. Heavy ion experiments were performed at the Texas A&M University Cyclotron Institute, utilizing Ne, Ar, Cu, and Ag in a 15 MeV/amu cocktail. Lastly, TID experiments were conducted using a Gammacell 220 Co-60 chamber at the University of Saskatchewan. By evaluating the performance of these designs under various irradiation conditions, we strive to advance the development of cost-effective, high-performance electronics suitable for space applications, ultimately demonstrating the significance of this project. When exposed to heavy ions, radiation-hardened FFs demonstrated varying levels of improvement in SEU performance, albeit with added power and timing penalties compared to conventional designs. Stacked-transistor DFF designs showed significant enhancement, while charge-cancelling and interleaving techniques further reduced upsets. Guard-gate (GG) based FF designs provided additional SEU protection, with the DFR-FF and GG-DICE FF designs showing zero upsets under all test conditions. Schmitt-trigger-based DFF designs exhibited improved SEU performance, making them attractive choices for hardening applications. The 22-nm FDSOI process proved more resilient to TID effects than the 28-nm process; however, TID effects remained prominent, with increased leakage current and SRAM block degradation at high doses. These findings offer valuable insights for designers aiming to meet performance and SER specifications for circuits in radiation environments, emphasizing the need for additional attention during the design phase for complex radiation-hardened circuits

The 1992 4th NASA SERC Symposium on VLSI Design

Papers from the fourth annual NASA Symposium on VLSI Design, co-sponsored by the IEEE, are presented. Each year this symposium is organized by the NASA Space Engineering Research Center (SERC) at the University of Idaho and is held in conjunction with a quarterly meeting of the NASA Data System Technology Working Group (DSTWG). One task of the DSTWG is to develop new electronic technologies that will meet next generation electronic data system needs. The symposium provides insights into developments in VLSI and digital systems which can be used to increase data systems performance. The NASA SERC is proud to offer, at its fourth symposium on VLSI design, presentations by an outstanding set of individuals from national laboratories, the electronics industry, and universities. These speakers share insights into next generation advances that will serve as a basis for future VLSI design

Cost-Efficient Soft-Error Resiliency for ASIP-based Embedded Systems

Recent decades have witnessed the rapid growth of embedded systems. At present, embedded systems are widely applied in a broad range of critical applications including automotive electronics, telecommunication, healthcare, industrial electronics, consumer electronics military and aerospace. Human society will continue to be greatly transformed by the pervasive deployment of embedded systems. Consequently, substantial amount of efforts from both industry and academic communities have contributed to the research and development of embedded systems. Application-specific instruction-set processor (ASIP) is one of the key advances in embedded processor technology, and a crucial component in some embedded systems. Soft errors have been directly observed since the 1970s. As devices scale, the exponential increase in the integration of computing systems occurs, which leads to correspondingly decrease in the reliability of computing systems. Today, major research forums state that soft errors are one of the major design technology challenges at and beyond the 22 nm technology node. Therefore, a large number of soft-error solutions, including error detection and recovery, have been proposed from differing perspectives. Nonetheless, most of the existing solutions are designed for general or high-performance systems which are different to embedded systems. For embedded systems, the soft-error solutions must be cost-efficient, which requires the tailoring of the processor architecture with respect to the feature of the target application. This thesis embodies a series of explorations for cost-efficient soft-error solutions for ASIP-based embedded systems. In this exploration, five major solutions are proposed. The first proposed solution realizes checkpoint recovery in ASIPs. By generating customized instructions, ASIP-implemented checkpoint recovery can perform at a finer granularity than what was previously possible. The fault-free performance overhead of this solution is only 1.45% on average. The recovery delay is only 62 cycles at the worst case. The area and leakage power overheads are 44.4% and 45.6% on average. The second solution explores utilizing two primitive error recovery techniques jointly. This solution includes three application-specific optimization methodologies. This solution generates the optimized error-resilient ASIPs, based on the characteristics of primitive error recovery techniques, static reliability analysis and design constraints. The resultant ASIP can be configured to perform at runtime according to the optimized recovery scheme. This solution can strategically enhance cost-efficiency for error recovery. In order to guarantee cost-efficiency in unpredictable runtime situations, the third solution explores runtime adaptation for error recovery. This solution aims to budget and adapt the error recovery operations, so as to spend the resources intelligently and to tolerate adverse influences of runtime variations. The resultant ASIP can make runtime decisions to determine the activation of spatial and temporal redundancies, according to the runtime situations. At the best case, this solution can achieve almost 50x reliability gain over the state of the art solutions. Given the increasing demand for multi-core computing systems, the last two proposed solutions target error recovery in multi-core ASIPs. The first solution of these two explores ASIP-implemented fine-grained process migration. This solution is a key infrastructure, which allows cost-efficient task management, for realizing cost-efficient soft-error recovery in multi-core ASIPs. The average time cost is only 289 machine cycles to perform process migration. The last solution explores using dynamic and adaptive mapping to assign heterogeneous recovery operations to the tasks in the multi-core context. This solution allows each individual ASIP-based processing core to dynamically adapt its specific error recovery functionality according to the corresponding task's characteristics, in terms of soft error vulnerability and execution time deadline. This solution can significantly improve the reliability of the system by almost two times, with graceful constraint penalty, in comparison to the state-of-the-art counterparts

The 1991 3rd NASA Symposium on VLSI Design

Papers from the symposium are presented from the following sessions: (1) featured presentations 1; (2) very large scale integration (VLSI) circuit design; (3) VLSI architecture 1; (4) featured presentations 2; (5) neural networks; (6) VLSI architectures 2; (7) featured presentations 3; (8) verification 1; (9) analog design; (10) verification 2; (11) design innovations 1; (12) asynchronous design; and (13) design innovations 2

Intelligent Circuits and Systems

ICICS-2020 is the third conference initiated by the School of Electronics and Electrical Engineering at Lovely Professional University that explored recent innovations of researchers working for the development of smart and green technologies in the fields of Energy, Electronics, Communications, Computers, and Control. ICICS provides innovators to identify new opportunities for the social and economic benefits of society.　 This conference bridges the gap between academics and R&D institutions, social visionaries, and experts from all strata of society to present their ongoing research activities and foster research relations between them. It provides opportunities for the exchange of new ideas, applications, and experiences in the field of smart technologies and finding global partners for future collaboration. The ICICS-2020 was conducted in two broad categories, Intelligent Circuits & Intelligent Systems and Emerging Technologies in Electrical Engineering

Integrated RF oscillators and LO signal generation circuits

This thesis deals with fully integrated LC oscillators and local oscillator (LO) signal generation circuits. In communication systems a good-quality LO signal for up- and down-conversion in transmitters is needed. The LO signal needs to span the required frequency range and have good frequency stability and low phase noise. Furthermore, most modern systems require accurate quadrature (IQ) LO signals. This thesis tackles these challenges by presenting a detailed study of LC oscillators, monolithic elements for good-quality LC resonators, and circuits for IQ-signal generation and for frequency conversion, as well as many experimental circuits. Monolithic coils and variable capacitors are essential, and this thesis deals with good structures of these devices and their proper modeling. As experimental test devices, over forty monolithic inductors and thirty varactors have been implemented, measured and modeled. Actively synthesized reactive elements were studied as replacements for these passive devices. At first glance these circuits show promising characteristics, but closer noise and nonlinearity analysis reveals that these circuits suffer from high noise levels and a small dynamic range. Nine circuit implementations with various actively synthesized variable capacitors were done. Quadrature signal generation can be performed with three different methods, and these are analyzed in the thesis. Frequency conversion circuits are used for alleviating coupling problems or to expand the number of frequency bands covered. The thesis includes an analysis of single-sideband mixing, frequency dividers, and frequency multipliers, which are used to perform the four basic arithmetical operations for the frequency tone. Two design cases are presented. The first one is a single-sideband mixing method for the generation of WiMedia UWB LO-signals, and the second one is a frequency conversion unit for a digital period synthesizer. The last part of the thesis presents five research projects. In the first one a temperature-compensated GaAs MESFET VCO was developed. The second one deals with circuit and device development for an experimental-level BiCMOS process. A cable-modem RF tuner IC using a SiGe process was developed in the third project, and a CMOS flip-chip VCO module in the fourth one. Finally, two frequency synthesizers for UWB radios are presented