An Approach to Emulate and Validate the Effects of Single Event Upsets using the PREDICT FUTRE Hardware Integrated Framework

Due to the advances in electronics design automation industry, worldwide, the integrated approach to model and emulate the single event effects due to cosmic radiation, in particular single event upsets or single event transients is gaining momentum. As of now, no integrated methodology to inject the fault in parallel to functional test vectors or to estimate the effects of radiation for a selected function in system on chip at design phase exists. In this paper, a framework, PRogrammable single Event effects Demonstrator for dIgital Chip Technologies (PREDICT) failure assessment for radiation effects is developed using a hardware platform and aided by genetic algorithms addressing all the above challenges. A case study is carried out to evaluate the frameworks capability to emulate the effects of radiation using the co-processor as design under test (DUT) function. Using the ML605 and Virtex-6 evaluation board for single and three particle simulations with the layered atmospheric conditions, the proposed framework consumes approximately 100 min and 300 min, respectively; it consumes 600 min for 3 particle random atmospheric conditions, using the 64 GB RAM, 64-bit operating system with 3.1 GHz processor based workstation. The framework output transforms the 4 MeVcm2/mg linear energy transfer to a single event transient pulse width of 2 μs with 105 amplification factor for visualisation, which matches well with the existing experimental results data. Using the framework, the effects of radiation for the co-processing module are estimated during the design phase and the success rate of the DUT is found to be 48 per cent

Soft Error Detection and Correction Technique for Radiation Hardening Based on C-element and BICS

International audience-Higher density of integration and lower power technologies are becoming more sensitive to soft errors caused by radiations. Not only memories and latches are being affected but also combinatorial circuits. Hardening by design techniques based on increasing the amount of charge representing the bit and redundancy techniques have been used over the years. But what happens if the hardening is affected? Who guards the guardians? This work proposes a system that acts as an SET filter and as a check point with self healing properties to prevent SET propagation. Index Terms-Cosmic rays, Soft Error, SET, SEU, Critical Charge, Temporal Filtering, C-element, BICS current sensor

Soft-Error Resilience Framework For Reliable and Energy-Efficient CMOS Logic and Spintronic Memory Architectures

The revolution in chip manufacturing processes spanning five decades has proliferated high performance and energy-efficient nano-electronic devices across all aspects of daily life. In recent years, CMOS technology scaling has realized billions of transistors within large-scale VLSI chips to elevate performance. However, these advancements have also continually augmented the impact of Single-Event Transient (SET) and Single-Event Upset (SEU) occurrences which precipitate a range of Soft-Error (SE) dependability issues. Consequently, soft-error mitigation techniques have become essential to improve systems\u27 reliability. Herein, first, we proposed optimized soft-error resilience designs to improve robustness of sub-micron computing systems. The proposed approaches were developed to deliver energy-efficiency and tolerate double/multiple errors simultaneously while incurring acceptable speed performance degradation compared to the prior work. Secondly, the impact of Process Variation (PV) at the Near-Threshold Voltage (NTV) region on redundancy-based SE-mitigation approaches for High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems was investigated to highlight the approach that can realize favorable attributes, such as reduced critical datapath delay variation and low speed degradation. Finally, recently, spin-based devices have been widely used to design Non-Volatile (NV) elements such as NV latches and flip-flops, which can be leveraged in normally-off computing architectures for Internet-of-Things (IoT) and energy-harvesting-powered applications. Thus, in the last portion of this dissertation, we design and evaluate for soft-error resilience NV-latching circuits that can achieve intriguing features, such as low energy consumption, high computing performance, and superior soft errors tolerance, i.e., concurrently able to tolerate Multiple Node Upset (MNU), to potentially become a mainstream solution for the aerospace and avionic nanoelectronics. Together, these objectives cooperate to increase energy-efficiency and soft errors mitigation resiliency of larger-scale emerging NV latching circuits within iso-energy constraints. In summary, addressing these reliability concerns is paramount to successful deployment of future reliable and energy-efficient CMOS logic and spintronic memory architectures with deeply-scaled devices operating at low-voltages