MARS-S: Modeling and Reduction of Soft Errors in Sequential Circuits

Due to the shrinking of feature size and reduction in supply voltages, nanoscale circuits have become more susceptible to radiation induced transient faults. In this paper, the authors use a symbolic framework based on BDDs and ADDs that enables analysis of sequential circuit reliability from different aspects: output susceptibility to error, influence of individual gates on individual outputs and overall circuit reliability, and the dependence of circuit reliability on glitch duration, amplitude, and input patterns. The framework can be used for selective gate sizing targeting radiation hardening which is done only for gates with error impact exceeding a certain threshold. Using such a technique SER can be reduced by 80% for various threshold values, when applied to a subset of ISCAS'89 benchmarks