SET and noise fault tolerant circuit design techniques: Application to 7 nm FinFET

In the near future of high component density and low-power technologies, soft errors occurring not only in memory systems and latches but also in the combinational parts of logic circuits will seriously affect the reliable operation of integrated circuits. This paper presents a novel design style which reduces the impact of radiation-induced single event transients (SET) on logic circuits, and enhances the robustness in noisy environments. The independent design style of this method achieves SET mitigation and noise immunity by strengthening the sensitive nodes using a technique similar to feedback. A realization for this methodology is presented in 7 nm FinFET and in order to check the accuracy of our proposal, we compare it with others techniques for hardening radiation at the transistor level against a single event transient. Simulation results show that the proposed method has a good soft error tolerance capability as well as better noise immunity.     

Soft Error Rate Reduction Using Circuit Optimization and Transient Filter Insertion

This paper describes a tunable transient filter (TTF) design for soft error rate reduction in combinational logic circuits. TTFs can be inserted into combinational circuits to suppress propagated single-event transients (SETs) before they can be captured in latches or flip-flops. TTFs are tuned by adjusting the maximum width of the propagated SET that can be suppressed. A TTF requires 6–14 transistors, making it an attractive cost-effective option to reduce the soft error rate in combinational circuits. A global optimization approach based on geometric programming that integrates TTF insertion with dual-V _DD and gate sizing is described. Simulation results for the 65 nm process technology indicate that a 17–48× reduction in the soft error rate can be achieved with this approach.     

Mitigation for single event coupling delay

With advances in CMOS technology, circuits are increasingly more sensitive to transient pulses caused by single event particles. It has been predicted that the majority of the observed radiation induced soft failures in technologies below 65 nm will be because of transients that will occur in combinational logic (CL) circuits. Researchers mostly consider single event transients as the main source for CL related radiation-induced soft errors. However, for high reliability applications such as avionics additional sources need to be included in reliability analysis. In this work, we report a new error mechanism named ‘single event crosstalk delay’, investigate the vulnerability of recent technologies to these delay effects and then propose hardening techniques for single event crosstalk delay. Results are demonstrated using HSpice simulations with interconnect and device parameters derived in 130, 90 and 65 nm technology.     

Coupling induced soft error mechanisms in nanoscale CMOS technologies

Due to scaling induced effects, CMOS circuits become increasingly more sensitive to transient pulses caused by single event (SE) particles. Researchers mostly considered SE transients as the main cause for combinational logic (CL) related radiation-induced soft errors. However, for high-reliability applications such as avionics, military and medical applications, additional sources such as SE induced soft delays, clock jitters, false clock pulses and crosstalk effects need to be included in soft-error reliability analysis. As technologies advance, coupling effects among interconnects increasingly cause SE transients to contaminate electronically unrelated circuit paths, which can in turn increase the “SE susceptibility” of CMOS circuits. This work focuses on such coupling induced soft error mechanisms in CL, namely the SE crosstalk noise and delay effects. An attempt has been made to compare SE crosstalk noise and SE transient effects, and crosstalk contribution to soft error rate has been examined. In addition, the SE induced coupling delay effect has been studied and compared to radiation induced soft delay effect for various technologies. Results show that, in newer technologies, the SE coupling delay becomes quite comparable to soft delay effect, although caused indirectly by cross-coupling effects. In comparisons, the distributed nature of interconnects has been taken into account and results are demonstrated using HSPICE simulations with interconnect and device parameters derived in 130, 90 and 65 nm technologies.     

A New Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Digital CMOS Circuits and Systems

This paper presents a new hybrid fault-tolerant architecture for robustness improvement of digital CMOS circuits and systems. It targets all kinds of errors in combinational part of logic circuits and thus, can be combined with advanced SEU protection techniques for sequential elements while reducing the power consumption. The proposed architecture combines different types of redundancies: information redundancy for error detection, temporal redundancy for soft error correction and hardware redundancy for hard error correction. Moreover, it uses a pseudo-dynamic comparator for SET and timing errors detection. Besides, the proposed method also aims to reduce power consumption of fault-tolerant architectures while keeping a comparable area overhead compared to existing solutions. Results on the largest ISCAS’85 and ITC’99 benchmark circuits show that our approach has an area cost of about 3 % to 6 % with a power consumption saving of about 33 % compared to TMR architectures.     

Temperature effects on BTI and soft errors in modern logic circuits

Since thermal responses of the drive current in recent 3D FinFET and conventional planar transistors are different, addressing performance and reliability in advanced VLSI circuits must be reconsidered. This study investigates temperature effects on two of the most problematic reliability issues in modern logic circuits, namely Bias Temperature Instability (BTI) and soft errors. In particular, we initially examine the inversion of temperature effect that strengthens the drive current in 14-nm bulk tri-gate FinFETs with increasing temperature, and model it as a source of threshold voltage reduction. This temperature-induced threshold voltage variation is consequently adapted into our proposed simulation and analysis framework for BTI degradation in large combinational circuits. The BTI aging results from our proposed estimation are more pessimistic than that from the conventional approach where the temperature effect is excluded. Simulation results show that long-term BTI aging delay worsens as temperature increases, yet the domination of thermal effect on the drive current leads to overall performance improvement in all circuits under 10-year BTI stress. In addition, soft errors and their masking probabilities in logic circuits are addressed under the inversion of temperature effect and supply voltage variation. The results reveal that soft error immunity in all experimental circuits improves significantly with increasing supply voltage and temperature, mainly due to the increase of critical charge. The average relative soft error rate when the supply voltage changes from 0.4 V to 0.6 V and 0.8 V at 0 °C is as low as 3.7% and 0.08% of the average result at 0.4 V, respectively. On average, the relative soft error rate at a particular supply voltage when temperature changes from 0 °C to 40 °C, 80 °C, and 120 °C is around 70%, 50%, and 30% of the average result at 0 °C, respectively.     

A Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Highly Reliable Processing Cores

Increasing vulnerability of transistors and interconnects due to scaling is continuously challenging the reliability of future microprocessors. Lifetime reliability is gaining attention over performance as a design factor even for lower-end commodity applications. In this work we present a low-power hybrid fault tolerant architecture for reliability improvement of pipelined microprocessors by protecting their combinational logic parts. The architecture can handle a broad spectrum of faults with little impact on performance by combining different types of redundancies. Moreover, it addresses the problem of error propagation in nonlinear pipelines and error detection in pipeline stages with memory interfaces. Our case-study implementation of a fault tolerant MIPS microprocessor highlights four main advantages of the proposed solution. It offers (i) 11.6 % power saving, (ii) improved transient error detection capability, (iii) lifetime reliability improvement, and (iv) more effective fault accumulation effect handling, in comparison with TMR architectures. We also present a gate-level fault-injection framework that offers high fidelity to model physical defects and transient faults.     

Soft-error filtering: A solution to the reliability problem of future VLSI digital circuits

As the semiconductor industry continues to scale down the feature sizes in VLSI digital circuits, soft errors will eventually limit the reliability of these circuits. An important source of these errors will be the products of radioactive decay. It is proposed to combat these transient errors by a new technique called soft-error filtering (SEF). This is based on filtering the input to every latch in the VLSI circuit, thereby preventing these transients, generated by alpha particle hits in the combinational section, from being latched in the corresponding registers. Several approaches to the problem of designing filtering latches are compared. This comparison demonstrates the superiority of a double-filter realization. The design for a CMOS implementation of the double-filter latch is presented. Not only is the design simple and efficient, but it can be expected to be tolerant to process variations. A comparison of SEF with conventional techniques for dealing with soft errors shows the former to be generally much more attractive, from the point of view of both area and time overhead.     

Switch-level soft error emulation for SET-induced pulses of variable strengths

Due to the increased complexity of modern digital circuits, the use of simulation-based soft error detection methods has become cumbersome and very time-consuming. FPGA-based emulation provides an attractive alternative, as it can not only provide faster speed, but also handle highly complex circuits. In this work, a novel FPGA-based soft error detection technique is proposed, which enables detection of soft errors resulting from voltage pulses of different magnitudes induced by single-event transients (SETs). The paper analyzes the effect of transient injection location on soft error rate (SER) and applies the idea of transient equivalence to minimize resource overhead as well as speed-up emulation process. Switch-level implementations of ISCAS’85 benchmarks are designed using gate-level structures and experimental results are reported. The results show that an application of transient equivalence results in an emulation speed-up of 2.875 and reduces the memory utilization by 65%. An average soft error rate (SER) of 0.7-0.8 was achieved using the proposed strength-based detection with drain as transient injection location, showing that voltage pulses of magnitude smaller than logic threshold can eventually result in soft errors. Furthermore, the presented emulation-based soft error detection technique achieved significant speed-up of the order of 10⁶ compared to a customized simulation-based method.     

考虑多时钟周期瞬态脉冲叠加的锁存窗屏蔽模型

集成电路工艺水平的提升,使得由单粒子瞬态脉冲造成的芯片失效越发不容忽视．为了准确计算单粒子瞬态脉冲对锁存器造成的失效率,提出一种考虑多时钟周期瞬态脉冲叠加的锁存窗屏蔽模型．使用提出的考虑扇出重汇聚的敏化路径逼近搜索算法查找门节点到达锁存器的敏化路径,并记录路径延迟;在扇出重汇聚路径上,使用提出的脉冲叠加计算方法对脉冲进行叠加;对传播到达锁存器的脉冲使用提出的锁存窗屏蔽模型进行失效率的计算．文中的锁存窗屏蔽模型可以准确计算扇出重汇聚导致的脉冲叠加,并对多时钟周期情形具有很好的适用性．针对ISCAS’85基准电路的软错误率评估结果表明,与不考虑多时钟周期瞬态脉冲叠加的方法相比,文中方法使用不到2倍的时间开销,平均提高7．5％的软错误率评估准确度．     

Switch-level emulation of strength-base soft error detection

Modern nanometer circuits have become more prone to soft errors necessitating faster and more reliable error detection techniques. Simulation-based soft error detection has been popular but is limited by its inability to handle complex circuits and high run-time. FPGA-based soft error detection methods can be effectively used to overcome the speed limitation of simulation as well as handle circuits with much higher complexity. The paper presents a novel strength-based soft error emulation method targeting soft errors caused by transient pulses of magnitude less than logic threshold. The impact of transient injection location on soft error coverage is analyzed and the idea of using drain of a transistor as transient injection location is presented. Furthermore, the concept of transient equivalence is applied to minimize resource overhead as well as speed-up soft error detection process. Advanced switch-level models are designed using gate-level structure and used to implement switch-level equivalents of ISCAS’85 benchmarks. The experimental results reported for ISCAS’85 benchmarks show that an average soft error coverage of 0.7-0.8 was achieved using the proposed strength-based detection with drain as transient injection location. The application of transient equivalence resulted in speed-up of emulation by 2.875 and reduced the memory utilization by 65%. The emulation-based soft error detection achieved significant speed-up of the order of 10⁶ as compared to a customized simulation-based method.     

Method for evaluation of transient-fault detection techniques

This work introduces a simulation-based method for evaluating the efficiency of detection techniques in identifying transient faults provoked in combinational logic blocks. Typical fault profiles are simulated in campaigns of injections that reproduce output scenarios of fault-affected combinational circuits. Furthermore, a detection technique is proposed and compared to state-of-the-art strategies by using the method presented herein. Results show the capabilities of all studied techniques, providing a rank in terms of their efficiencies in detecting transient faults induced in combinational logic circuits, and analyzing the situations in which soft errors are produced in memory elements.     

Soft error estimation and mitigation of digital circuits by characterizing input patterns of logic gates

Soft errors caused by particles strike in combinational parts of digital circuits are a major concern in the design of reliable circuits. Several techniques have been presented to protect combinational logic and reduce the overall circuit Soft Error Rate (SER). Such techniques, however, typically come at the cost of significant area and performance overheads. This paper presents a low area and zero-delay overhead method to protect digital circuits’ combinational parts against particles strike. This method is made up of a combination of two sub-methods: (1) a SER estimation method based on signal probability, called Estimation by Characterizing Input Patterns (ECIP) and (2) a protection method based on gate sizing, called Weighted and Timing Aware Gate Sizing (WTAGS). Unlike the previous techniques that either overlook internal nodes signal probability or exploit fault injection, ECIP computes the sensitivity of each gate by analytical calculations of both the probability of transient pulse generation and the probability of transient pulse propagation; these calculations are based on signal probability of the whole circuit nodes which make ECIP much more accurate as well as practical for large circuits. Using the results of ECIP, WTAGS characterizes the most sensitive gates to efficiently allocate the redundancy budget. The simulation results show the SER reduction of about 40% by applying the proposed method to ISCAS’89 benchmark circuits while imposing no delay overhead and 5% area overhead.     

A method to assess the robustness of cryptographic circuits at the design stage

This paper proposes the use of an FPGA-based fault injection technique, AMUSE, to study the effect of malicious attacks on cryptographic circuits. Originally, AMUSE was devised to analyze the soft error effects (SEU and SET) in digital circuits. However, many of the fault-based attacks used in cryptanalysis produce faults that can be modeled as bit-flip in memory elements or transient pulses in combinational logic, as in faults due to radiation effects. Experimental results provide information that allows the cryptographic circuit designer to detect the weakest areas in order to implement countermeasures at design stage.     

A finite state machine based fault tolerance technique for sequential circuits

With technology advancement at the nanometer scale, systems became more subjected to higher manufacturing defects and higher susceptibility to soft errors. Currently, soft errors induced by ion particles are no longer limited to a specific field such as aerospace applications. This raises the challenge to come up with techniques to tackle soft errors in both combinational and sequential circuits. In this work, we propose a finite state machine (FSM) based fault tolerance technique for sequential circuits. The proposed technique is based on adding redundant equivalent states to protect few states with high probability of occurrence. The added states guarantee that all single faults occurring in the state variables of highly occurring states or in their combinational logic are tolerated. The proposed technique has minimal area overhead as only few states need protection.     

PIPBQ Effect Aware SER Analysis for Combinational Logic Circuits

Technology scaling results in the propagation-induced pulse broadening and quenching (PIPBQ) effect become more noticeable. In order to effectively evaluate the soft error rate for combinational logic circuits, a soft error rate analysis approach considering the PIPBQ effect is proposed. As different original pulse propagating through logic gate cells, pulse broadening and quenching are measured by HSPICE. After that, electrical effect look-up tables (EELUTs) for logic gate cells are created to evaluate the PIPBQ effect. Sensitized paths are accurately retrieved by the proposed re-convergence aware sensitized path search algorithm. Further, by propagating pulses on these paths to simulate fault injection, the PIPBQ effect on these paths can be quantified by EELUTs. As a result, the soft error rate of circuits can be effectively computed by the proposed technique. Simulation results verify the soft error rate improvement comparing with the PIPBQ-not-aware method.     

FAOG:基于过滤技术和AOG的组合电路多故障诊断算法

本文提出了一种用于组合电路中的多故障诊断的新算法FAOG（Filtered AND／OR graphs）。此算法基于过滤技术和AOG图。其中过滤技术用来除去电路中的非可能致错部分，以减少所需处理的电路规模。AOG是与电路对应的AND／OR图，是改错的关键部分。此算法对于树状组合电路是完全自动的。对于普通组合电路是半自动的。它既解决了基于模拟的改错算法只能限定出错区域而不能告知如何诊断故障信息的局限性，也大大减轻了符号诊断法的内存爆炸问题。实验表明，这是一种快速高效的故障诊断方案，适用于多故障的组合电路。     

Low-Power Resonant Clocking Using Soft Error Robust Energy Recovery Flip-Flops

An energy recovery or resonant clocking scheme is very attractive for saving the clock power in nanoscale ASICs and systems-on-chips, which have increased functionality and die sizes. The technology scaling followed Moore’s law, that lowers node capacitance and supply voltage, making nanoscale integrated circuits more vulnerable to radiation-induced single event upsets (SEUs) or soft errors. In this work, we propose soft-error robust flip-flops (FFs) capable of working with a sinusoidal resonant clock to save the overall chip power. The proposed conditional-pass Quatro (CPQ) FF and true single phase clock energy recovery (TSPCER) FF are based on a unique soft error robust latch, which we refer to as a Quatro latch. The proposed C²-DICE FF is based on a dual interlocked cell (DICE) latch. In addition to the storage cell, each FF consists of a unique input-stage and a two-transistor, two-input output buffer. In each FF with a sinusoidal clock, the transfer unit passes the data to the Quatro and DICE latches. The latches store the data values at two storage nodes and two redundant nodes, the latter enabling recovery from a particle-induced transient with or without multiple-node charge sharing. Post-layout simulations in 65nm CMOS technology show that the FF exhibits as much as 82% lower power-delay product compared to recently reported soft error robust FFs. We implemented 1024 proposed FFs distributed in an H-tree clock network driven by a resonant clock-generator that generates a 1–5 GHz sinusoidal clock signal. The simulation results show a power reduction of 93% on the clock tree and total power saving of up to 74% as compared to the same implementation using the conventional square-wave clocking scheme and FFs.     

Noise Analysis of Soft Errors in Combinational Digital Circuits Via Walsh Transforms

The noise produced at the output of combinational logic circuits by individual gate failures is analyzed through the use of Walsh functions. Soft errors are modeled by allowing the output of each gate in a particular realization to fail temporarily, possibly introducing an error in the single binary output. The input variables also are allowed to be stochastically driven. The output probability of error contains the Walsh transform of an extended logic function and the Walsh characteristic functions of the input variables as well as the individual gate failure variables. These results are specialized to the case where the inputs are statistically independent of the soft errors. A discussion of the transform of the extended logic function is included.     

Minimizing detection-to-boosting latency toward low-power error-resilient circuits

Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has become one of the most effective approaches to achieve ultra-low-power SoC. To eliminate timing errors arising from DVS, several error-resilient circuit design techniques were proposed to detect and/or correct timing violations. The most recently proposed time-borrowing-and-local-boosting (TBLB) technique has the advantage of lower power consumption and less performance degradation due to the needlessness of pipeline stalls. On the other hand, to make the best use of the TBLB technique, the latency from error detection to voltage boosting for TBLB latches must be carefully considered, especially during physical design. To address this issue, this paper first introduces the behavior of TBLB circuits, and then presents two major design styles of TBLB latches, including TBLB macros and multi-bit TBLB latches, for reducing detection-to-boosting latency. The corresponding physical synthesis methodologies for both design styles are further proposed. Experimental results based on the IWLS benchmarks show that the proposed physical synthesis approach for resilient circuits with multi-bit TBLB latches is very effective in reducing the delay of both combinational and error-detection circuits, which indicates better circuit reliability. To our best knowledge, this is the first work in the literature which introduces the physical synthesis methodologies for TBLB resilient circuits.