Extending Moore's law into the next decade - the SER challenge

Summary form only given. This talk focuses on the challenges and opportunities of extending Moore's law from a radiation-induced soft error rate (SER) point of view. Driven primarily by power constraints and the economic need to scale, tomorrow's microprocessors will continue to integrate more cores and memory onto a roughly constant die area and to a lesser extend increase the clock frequency by implementing deeper pipelines and pushing the process. It is widely believed that this strategy -despite all challenges-will enable the semiconductor industry to extend Moore's law for the next 1-2 decades. Ever since the famous discoveries of May and Woods in 1978 as well as Ziegler and Lanford in 1979 that alpha-particles and neutrons can compromise the data integrity of terrestrial devices, a steep increase of radiation-induced failure rates of unhardened key microprocessor components has been projected. This talk will discuss historical soft error trends and try to explain why this catastrophic increase in device/product SER has never materialized. Finally, the author will address the major data integrity challenges faced by the industry today and discuss what SER mitigation techniques might be needed in the next decade to continue to manufacture reliable products