Quantitative evaluation of register vulnerabilities in RTL control paths

Radiation-induced soft error is a significant reliability issue in nanoscale technology nodes. In this paper, a novel approach based on probabilistic model checking is proposed to quantify the soft error vulnerabilities of the registers in the control paths at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL). Efficient abstraction and model simplification techniques are proposed to significantly improve the scalability of our method. The experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed techniques to successfully quantify the register vulnerabilities in the RTL design, to be used for cost-effective selective register protection.