A Fast Simulation Method for Analysis of SEE in VLSI

The transistor simulation tools (e.g. TCAD and SPICE) are widely used to simulate single event effects (SEE) in industry. However, due to the variances of the physical parameters in practical design, e.g. the nature of the particle, linear energy transfer and circuit characteristics would have a large impacts on the final simulation accuracy, which will significantly increase the complexity and cost in the workflow of the transistor level simulation for large scale circuits. Therefore, a new SEE simulation scheme is proposed to offer a fast and cost-efficient method to evaluate and compare the performance of large scale circuits in the effects of radiation particles. In this work, we have combined both the advantages of transistor and hardware description language (HDL) simulations, and proposed accurate SEE digital error models for high-speed error analysis in the large scale circuits. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is able to handle SEE simulations for more than 40 different circuits with the sizes varied from 100 transistors to 100 k transistors

New Techniques for On-line Testing and Fault Mitigation in GPUs

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

On the evaluation of SEU effects in GPGPUs

General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPUs) are effective solutions for high-demand data applications which involve multi-signal, image and video processing thanks to their powerful parallel architecture. In the last years, GPGPUs have been considered also for safety-critical applications, such as autonomous and semi-autonomous car driving systems. New GPGPU devices include an increasing number of parallel cores in order to increase throughput and performance. This increment in the number of cores and the requirements in terms of power consumption force designers to use aggressive semiconductor technologies. Nevertheless, those new devices can be seriously affected by radiation effects, modeled as Single Event Upsets (SEUs). SEUs could generate unexpected operation effects in the applications which could be unacceptable for the safety-critical ones. This work analyzes the SEU effects resorting to an open-source model of a GPGPU based on the Nvidia's G80 architecture and aims at complementing previous analysis based on radiation experiments