Effects of intermittent faults on the reliability of a Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) microprocessor

© 2014 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.With the scaling of complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology to the submicron range, designers have to deal with a growing number and variety of fault types. In this way, intermittent faults are gaining importance in modern very large scale integration (VLSI) circuits. The presence of these faults is increasing due to the complexity of manufacturing processes (which produce residues and parameter variations), together with special aging mechanisms. This work presents a case study of the impact of intermittent faults on the behavior of a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) microprocessor. We have carried out an exhaustive reliability assessment by using very-high-speed-integrated-circuit hardware description language (VHDL)-based fault injection. In this way, we have been able to modify different intermittent fault parameters, to select various targets, and even, to compare the impact of intermittent faults with those induced by transient and permanent faults.This work was supported by the Spanish Government under the Research Project TIN2009-13825 and by the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia under the Project SP20120806. Associate Editor: L. Cui.Gracia-Morán, J.; Baraza Calvo, JC.; Gil Tomás, DA.; Saiz-Adalid, L.; Gil, P. (2014). Effects of intermittent faults on the reliability of a Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) microprocessor. IEEE Transactions on Reliability. 63(1):144-153. doi:10.1109/TR.2014.2299711S14415363