research-article

Sequential element design with built-in soft error resilience

Authors:

Subhasish Mitra,

Norbert Seifert,

Nicholas J. Wang,

Naresh R. Shanbhag,

Sanjay J. PatelAuthors Info & Claims

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, Volume 14, Issue 12

Pages 1368 - 1378

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVLSI.2006.887832

Published: 01 December 2006 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a built-in soft error resilience (BISER) technique for correcting radiation-induced soft errors in latches and flip-flops. The presented error-correcting latch and flip-flop designs are power efficient, introduce minimal speed penalty, and employ reuse of on-chip scan design-for-testability and design-for-debug resources to minimize area overheads. Circuit simulations using a sub-90-nm technology show that the presented designs achieve more than a 20-fold reduction in cell-level soft error rate (SER). Fault injection experiments conducted on a microprocessor model further demonstrate that chip-level SER improvement is tunable by selective placement of the presented error-correcting designs. When coupled with error correction code to protect in-pipeline memories, the BISER flip-flop design improves chip-level SER by 10 times over an unprotected pipeline with the flip-flops contributing an extra 7-10.5% in power. When only soft errors in flips-flops are considered, the BISER technique improves chip-level SER by 10 times with an increased power of 10.3%. The error correction mechanism is configurable (i.e., can be turned on or off) which enables the use of the presented techniques for designs that can target multiple applications with a wide range of reliability requirements.

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Index Terms

Sequential element design with built-in soft error resilience
1. Hardware

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cover image IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems

IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems Volume 14, Issue 12

December 2006

108 pages

ISSN:1063-8210

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Copyright © 2006.

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IEEE Educational Activities Department

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 December 2006

Received: 30 August 2005

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