State-of-the-Art Techniques for Detecting Transient Errors in Electrical Circuits

A historical overview and the latest most promising techniques that allow the detection of a single transient error in a circuit, is presented. The following are presented: transient or soft errors; detecting transient errors with coding techniques: parity, Berger and Bose-Lin, Hamming encoding, error encoding in random logic; redundancy in time and space; error detection with logic synthesis; and logic implications.It is concluded that transient errors are a problem that are bound to get worse as new smaller technologies arise, and it is up to the designer to choose the most effective protective method for his needs.