Single-Event Upset Analysis and Protection in High Speed Circuits

The effect of single-event transients (SETs) (at a combinational node of a design) on the system reliability is becoming a big concern for ICs manufactured using advanced technologies. An SET at a node of combinational part may cause a transient pulse at the input of a flip-flop and consequently is latched in the flip-flop and generates a soft-error. When an SET conjoined with a transition at a node along a critical path of the combinational part of a design, a transient delay fault may occur at the input of a flip-flop. On the other hand, increasing pipeline depth and using low power techniques such as multi-level power supply, and multi-threshold transistor convert almost all paths in a circuit to critical ones. Thus, studying the behavior of the SET in these kinds of circuits needs special attention. This paper studies the dynamic behavior of a circuit with massive critical paths in the presence of an SET. We also propose a novel flip-flop architecture to mitigate the effects of such SETs in combinational circuits. Furthermore, the proposed architecture can tolerant a single event upset (SEU) caused by particle strike on the internal nodes of a flip-flo

Multiple-Node Charge Collection in 65 nm Technology Triple-Well SRAMs

The conventional CMOS fabrication process can be either a dual-well technology or a triple-well technology. Triple-well technology has been shown to be superior to dualwell technology in terms of electrical performance. However, for advanced deep-sub-micron technologies, reliability concerns over soft errors require a thorough investigation of these technologies. This work presents a comparative analysis of charge-collection mechanisms due to single events caused by ionizing particles in 65 nm dual- and triple-well technologies. Primary factors affecting the charge-collection mechanisms for a wide range of particle energies are investigated for SRAM circuits to show that triple-well technologies are more vulnerable at low LET particles while dual-well technologies are more vulnerable for high LET particles

Statistical Reliability Estimation of Microprocessor-Based Systems

What is the probability that the execution state of a given microprocessor running a given application is correct, in a certain working environment with a given soft-error rate? Trying to answer this question using fault injection can be very expensive and time consuming. This paper proposes the baseline for a new methodology, based on microprocessor error probability profiling, that aims at estimating fault injection results without the need of a typical fault injection setup. The proposed methodology is based on two main ideas: a one-time fault-injection analysis of the microprocessor architecture to characterize the probability of successful execution of each of its instructions in presence of a soft-error, and a static and very fast analysis of the control and data flow of the target software application to compute its probability of success. The presented work goes beyond the dependability evaluation problem; it also has the potential to become the backbone for new tools able to help engineers to choose the best hardware and software architecture to structurally maximize the probability of a correct execution of the target softwar

Automatic Generation of High Coverage Transient Fault Detectors Using GoldMine

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryNational Science Foundatio

Logic Soft Errors in Sub-65nm Technologies Design and CAD Challenges

For the past 25 years, the EDA industry has played a major role in the growth of the semiconductor industry, providing tools and services that have helped companies develop electronics products that permeate and improve every aspect of our daily lives. As the semiconductor industry moves into the nanometer era, they face many key questions when envisioning a new product. When do they want the product to reach the market? How will that product be differentiated? Where do they develop and manufacture that product? Less than a decade ago, these questions would have been answered completely independent of whatever EDA vendor a semiconductor company selected. However, in the nanometer era, the answers to these questions can be significantly influenced not only by EDA companies but also by the IP and pure-play foundries that make up the infrastructure of the semiconductor industry. In order to compete in a global marketplace, these companies must align their individual core competencies with those of the semiconductor industry to help IC companies create products with the optimal combination of performance, price, and time-to-market. In this panel, the CEOs of the three major EDA vendors, along with peers from the IP and manufacturing areas discuss these fundamental changes to the semiconductor industry, and the challenges of working together to help customers successfully bring new products to market. Jay Vleeschhouwer, a senior analyst for Merrill Lynch, will moderate a series of questions for the panelists from the customer’s point of view that address how EDA, IP and pureplay foundries can impact the competitiveness of semiconductor companies and the products they develop

Hard and Soft Error Resilience for One-sided Dense Linear Algebra Algorithms

Dense matrix factorizations, such as LU, Cholesky and QR, are widely used by scientific applications that require solving systems of linear equations, eigenvalues and linear least squares problems. Such computations are normally carried out on supercomputers, whose ever-growing scale induces a fast decline of the Mean Time To Failure (MTTF). This dissertation develops fault tolerance algorithms for one-sided dense matrix factorizations, which handles Both hard and soft errors. For hard errors, we propose methods based on diskless checkpointing and Algorithm Based Fault Tolerance (ABFT) to provide full matrix protection, including the left and right factor that are normally seen in dense matrix factorizations. A horizontal parallel diskless checkpointing scheme is devised to maintain the checkpoint data with scalable performance and low space overhead, while the ABFT checksum that is generated before the factorization constantly updates itself by the factorization operations to protect the right factor. In addition, without an available fault tolerant MPI supporting environment, we have also integrated the Checkpoint-on-Failure(CoF) mechanism into one-sided dense linear operations such as QR factorization to recover the running stack of the failed MPI process. Soft error is more challenging because of the silent data corruption, which leads to a large area of erroneous data due to error propagation. Full matrix protection is developed where the left factor is protected by column-wise local diskless checkpointing, and the right factor is protected by a combination of a floating point weighted checksum scheme and soft error modeling technique. To allow practical use on large scale system, we have also developed a complexity reduction scheme such that correct computing results can be recovered with low performance overhead. Experiment results on large scale cluster system and multicore+GPGPU hybrid system have confirmed that our hard and soft error fault tolerance algorithms exhibit the expected error correcting capability, low space and performance overhead and compatibility with double precision floating point operation