Digital Design Techniques for Dependable High Performance Computing

Abstract

As today’s process technologies continuously scale down, circuits become increasingly more vulnerable to radiation-induced soft errors in nanoscale VLSI technologies. The reduction of node capacitance and supply voltages coupled with increasingly denser chips are raising soft error rates and making them an important design issue. This research work is focused on the development of design techniques for high-reliability modern VLSI technologies, focusing mainly on Radiation-induced Single Event Transient. In this work, we evaluate the complete life-cycle of the SET pulse from the generation to the mitigation. A new simulation tool, Rad-Ray, has been developed to simulate and model the passage of heavy ion into the silicon matter of modern Integrated Circuit and predict the transient voltage pulse taking into account the physical description of the design. An analysis and mitigation tool has been developed to evaluate the propagation of the predicted SET pulses within the circuit and apply a selective mitigation technique to the sensitive nodes of the circuit. The analysis and mitigation tools have been applied to many industrial projects as well as the EUCLID space mission project, including more than ten modules. The obtained results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed tools.