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A fast, analytical estimator for the SEU-induced pulse width in combinational designs

Published: 08 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Single event upsets (SEUs) are becoming increasingly problematic for both combinational and sequential circuits with device scaling, lower supply voltages and higher operating frequencies. To design radiation tolerant circuits efficiently, techniques are required to analyze the effects of a particle strike on a circuit early in the design flow and also to evaluate the circuit's resilience to SEU events. In this paper, we present an analytical model for SEU induced transients in combinational circuits. The pulse width of the voltage glitch due to an SEU event is a good measure of SEU robustness and our model efficiently computes it for any combinational gate. The experimental results demonstrate that our model is very accurate with a very low pulse width estimation error of 4% compared to SPICE. Our model gains its accuracy by using a non-linear transistor current model, and by considering the effect of τβ of the radiation induced current pulse. Our analytical model is very fast and accurate, and can therefore be easily incorporated in a design flow to implement SEU tolerant circuits.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    DAC '08: Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference
    June 2008
    993 pages
    ISBN:9781605581156
    DOI:10.1145/1391469
    • General Chair:
    • Limor Fix
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 08 June 2008

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    Author Tags

    1. analysis
    2. model
    3. single event upset (SEU)

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    • (2024)A Holistic Approach for Characterization of SET Effects in a Standard Digital Cell Library2024 IEEE 15th Latin America Symposium on Circuits and Systems (LASCAS)10.1109/LASCAS60203.2024.10506165(1-5)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2024
    • (2023)Prediction of Generated Single Event Transient Pulse Width Using Artificial Intelligence Methods2023 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Microelectronics (MIEL)10.1109/MIEL58498.2023.10315809(1-4)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2023
    • (2021)Fast and Accurate SER Estimation for Large Combinational Blocks in Early Stages of the DesignIEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing10.1109/TSUSC.2018.28866406:3(427-440)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2021
    • (2020)A Physics-Based Single Event Transient Pulse Width Model for CMOS VLSI CircuitsIEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability10.1109/TDMR.2020.302328520:4(723-730)Online publication date: Dec-2020
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    • (2016)Fast-yet-accurate variation-aware current and voltage modelling of radiation-induced transient faultProceedings of the 2016 Conference on Design, Automation & Test in Europe10.5555/2971808.2971855(211-216)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2016
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