The impact of production defects on the soft-error tolerance of hardened latches

Abstract

As modern technology nodes get more and more susceptible to soft-errors, various hardened latch cells have been proposed. The added redundancy used to tolerate transient faults in the field at the same time reduces the test coverage of cell-internal production defects. Moreover, the test escapes reduce the soft-error tolerance of the defective latches. This work introduces a new soft-error vulnerability metric called Post Test Vulnerability Factor that correctly measures the added vulnerability to transiant frults such as particle strikes caused by undiscovered production defects within hardened latches.