ESD related soft error detection and root cause analysis

In this article, several methods are outlined for detecting functional changes in an IC due to external interference such as ESD or EMI. The goal is to provide diagnostic tools for detection of potential soft failure susceptibilities of complex systems during the hardware design stage without the aid of any complex software. After the soft errors are found, circuit modeling techniques are used to characterize the DUT. By running the circuit model, the soft error threshold can be predicted and the circuit model can be used to evaluate the performance of other ESD protection methods. In the end several methods are used to separate local soft-failures from distant errors related to noise on the power distribution network (PDN) is demonstrated. Two approaches are used, one passive and one active, which duplicate the noise on a system PDN caused by some intentional injection onto a second system where the intentional injection is not present --Abstract, page iii