Circuit-level Soft-Error Mitigation

ISBN 978-1-4419-6992-7; e-ISBN 978-1-4419-6993-4In nanometric technologies, circuits are increasingly sensitive to various kinds of perturbations. Soft errors, a concern in the past for space applications, became a reliability issue at ground level. Alpha particles and atmospheric neutrons induce single-event upsets (SEUs) affecting memory cells, latches, and flip-flops, and single-event transient (SETs) initiated in the combinational logical and captured by the associated latches and flip-flops. To face this challenge, a designer must dispose a variety of soft-error mitigation schemes adapted to various circuit structures, design architectures, and design constraints. In this chapter, we describe several SEU and SET mitigation schemes that could help designers to meet their reliability constraints