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Present and future semiconductor technologies are characterized by increasing parameters variations as well as an increasing susceptibility to external disturbances. Transient errors during system operation are no longer restricted to memories but also affect random logic, and a robust design becomes mandatory to ensure a reliable system operation. Self-checking circuits rely on redundancy to detect...
Error correcting coding is the dominant technique to achieve acceptable soft-error rates in memory arrays. In many modern circuits, the number of memory elements in the random logic is in the order of the number of SRAM cells on chips only a few years ago. Often latches are clock gated and have to retain their states during longer periods. Moreover, miniaturization has led to elevated susceptibility...
Soft errors caused by ionizing radiation have emerged as a major concern for current generation of CMOS technologies and the trend is expected to get worse. Soft error rate (SER) measurement, expressed as number of failures encountered per billion hours of device operation, is time consuming and involves significant test cost. The cost stems from having to connect a device-under-test to a tester for...
The problem of detection of control flow errors in software has been studied extensively in literature and many detection techniques have been proposed. These techniques typically have high memory and performance overheads and hence are unusable for real-time embedded systems which have tight memory and performance budgets. This paper presents two algorithms by which the overheads associated with...
Cryptographic devices are recently implemented with different countermeasures against side channel attacks and fault analysis. Moreover, some usual testing techniques, such as scan chains, are not allowed or restricted for security requirements. In this paper, we analyze the impact that error detecting schemes have on the testability of an implementation of the advanced encryption standard, in particular...
One effective fault injection approach involves instrumenting the RTL in a controlled manner to incorporate fault injection, and evaluating the behaviour of the faulty RTL whilst running some benchmark programs. This approach relies on checking the effects of faults whilst the design is executing a specific binary image, and therefore the true impact of the fault is limited by the shadow of the program...
In this paper, we propose a new SystemC-based fault injection technique that has improved fault representation in visible and on-the-fly data and signal registers. The technique is minimum intrusive since it only requires replacing the original data or signal types to fault injection enabler types. We compare the proposed simulation technique with recently reported SystemC-based techniques and show...
We present a practical, systematical method for the evaluation of the soft error rate (SER) of microelectronic devices. Existing methodologies, practices and tools are integrated in a common approach while highlighting the need for specific data or tools. The showcased method is particularly adapted for evaluating the SER of very complex microelectronic devices by engineers confronted to increasingly...
Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are getting more and more attractive for military and aerospace applications, among others devices. The usage of non volatile FPGAs, like Flash-based ones, reduces permanent radiation effects but transient faults are still a concern. In this paper we propose a new methodology for effectively measuring the width of radiation-induced transient faults thus allowing...
Software-based self-test (SBST) is increasingly used for testing processor cores embedded in SoCs, mainly because it allows at-speed, low-cost testing, while requiring limited (if any) hardware modifications to the original design. However, the method requires effective techniques for generating suitable test programs and for monitoring the results. In the case of processor core testing, a particularly...
Encryption algorithms could suffer fault injection attacks in order to obtain the secret key. In this paper, a specific protection for any round-based encryption algorithm is presented, analyzed and tested. It is providing a high degree of robustness together with a small penalty in the algorithm throughput when dealing with specific intentional attacks. Experimental results on advanced encryption...
This paper presents an efficient high-level synthesis (HLS) approach to improve RT-level concurrent testing. The proposed method used for both fault detection and fault location. At first the available resources are used in their dead intervals to test active resources for fault detection, and then some changes are applied to the RT-level controller to locate the faults. The fault detection step is...
The paper addresses the problem of creating a comprehensive fault injection environment, which integrates and improves various simulation and supplementary functions. This is illustrated with experimental results.
The purpose of TAFT fault tolerance studies conducted at CNES is to prepare the space community for the significant evolution linked to the usage of COTS components for developing spacecraft supercomputers. CNES has patented the DMT and DT2 fault-tolerant architectures with 'light' features. The development of a DMT/DT2 testbench based on a PowerPC7448 microprocessor from e2v is presented in this...
The downsizing of transistor dimensions enabled in the future nanotechnologies will inevitably increase the number of faults in the complex ULSI chips. To maintain the production yield at acceptable level, several levels of protection mechanisms will have to be implemented to tolerate the permanent and transient faults occurring in the physical layers. In this paper, we study fault tolerance at the...
The implementation of complex functionality in low-power nano-CMOS technologies leads to enhance susceptibility to parametric disturbances (environmental, and operation-dependent). The purpose of this paper is to present recent improvements on a methodology to exploit power-supply voltage and temperature variations in order to produce fault-tolerant structural solutions. First, the proposed methodology...
In many DSP applications (image and voice processing, baseband symbol decoding in high quality communication channels) several dBs of SNR loss can be tolerated without noticeable impact on system level performance. For power optimization in such applications, voltage overscaling can be used to operate the arithmetic circuitry slower than the critical circuit path delay while incurring tolerable SNR...
We propose a built-in scheme for generating all patterns of a given deterministic test set T. The scheme is based on grouping the columns of T, so that in each group of columns the number ri of unique representatives (row subvectors) as well as their product R over all such groups is kept at a minimum. The representatives of each group (segment) are then generated by a small finite state machine (FSM)...
Software-based self-test (SBST) has emerged as an effective strategy for non-concurrent on-line testing of processors integrated in embedded system applications. It offers the potential for on-line testing without any hardware overhead. However, test generation is usually based in a semi-automated approach and gate-level information is required for effective test program generation.In this paper we...
This paper describes several methodologies based on a pulsed laser beam to reveal the architecture of a high integrated SDRAM, and the different classes of Single Event Effects that can occur due to cosmic radiations. At cell level, laser is used to reveal an important technological parameter: the lithography process. At memory array level, laser is a powerful tool to retrieve cell physical arrangements,...
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