Soft Error and Its Countermeasures in Terrestrial Environment

This paper discusses soft errors in digital chips consisting of SRAM, flip-flops, and combinational logic in the terrestrial environment. We review the effectiveness of error-correction coding (ECC) in processor systems and point out the importance of radiation-hardened flip-flops for further error mitigation. The discussion includes the difference between planar and FD-SOI transistors, and the type of secondary cosmic rays including neutron and muon, using irradiation test results. Also, the difficulty in characterizing SER of a commercial GPU chip is exemplified.