Accelerating soft-error-rate (SER) estimation in the presence of single event transients

Abstract

Radiation-induced soft errors have posed an ever increasing reliability challenge as device dimensions keep shrinking in advanced CMOS technology. Therefore, it is imperative to devise fast and accurate soft error rate (SER) estimation methods. Previous works mainly focus on improving the accuracy of the SER results, whereas the speed improvement is limited to partitioning and parallel processing. This paper presents an efficient SER estimation framework for combinational logic circuits in the presence of single-event transients (SETs). A novel top-down memoization algorithm is proposed to accelerate the propagation of SETs. Experimental results of a variety of benchmark circuits demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves up to 560.2X times speedup with less than 3% difference in terms of SER results compared with the baseline algorithm.