Improvement of Self-Timed Pipeline Immunity of Soft Errors

Abstract

The paper presents the results of a study of self-timed (ST) digital circuits' soft-error tolerance. Practical ST circuits have a pipeline structure. The combinational parts of the ST pipeline are naturally immune to 72% of short-term soft errors. The proposed circuitry and layout methods increase the ST pipeline combinational part's failure tolerance to 98% and higher. ST pipeline stage register is the most susceptible to soft errors. A typical variant of the ST pipeline register bit unit based on C-elements has a failure tolerance of 83%. The proposed register bit implementation cases increase the failure tolerance of the ST pipeline up to 98%.