Frequency dependence of soft error rates for sub-micron CMOS technologies

The cycle time dependence of the alpha-particle induced soft error rate (SER) of the 21164 Alpha microprocessor has been investigated. The results of our studies suggest that the SER of the core logic decreases with increasing clock frequency and is dominated by contributions from dynamic latch nodes, whereas the SER of the caches tends to increase with frequency. This has important implications for the overall SER trend as technology moves towards higher frequencies.