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Continuous reduction in the minimum feature size of semiconductor devices and the supply voltages in advanced VLSI logic circuits has made those circuits more susceptible to soft errors. Hence, several fault tolerance techniques have been proposed in the literature to protect combinational circuits against single event transients (SETs). These fault tolerance techniques are based mainly on hardware...
Investigation of a fault-tolerant self-timed circuits show that a passively fault-tolerant circuit designed using traditional methods like an n-of-m reservation cannot be self-timed. This means, we need other approaches to receive circuits of this class. One possible solution was found in using of redundant gates or reservation at transistor-level. In this paper, the synthesis technique of fault-tolerant...
This paper presents a low-power soft error-hardened latch suitable for reliable circuits. The proposed circuit uses redundant feedback loop to protect latch circuit against soft error on the internal nodes and skewed CMOS to filter out transients resulting from particle hit on combinational logic. The proposed circuit has low power consumption, enhanced setup time and lower timing overhead. The HSPICE...
Nanoelectronic systems are extremely likely to demonstrate high defect and fault rates. As a result, defect and/or fault tolerance may be necessary at several levels throughout the system. Methods for improving defect tolerance, in order to prevent faults, at the component level for QCA have been studied. However, methods and results considering fault tolerance in QCA have received less attention...
It is widely recognized that device and interconnect fabrics at the nanoscale will be characterized by an increased susceptibility to transient faults. This appears to be intrinsic to nanoscale regimes and fundamentally limits the eventual benefits of the increased device density, i.e., the overheads associated with achieving fault-tolerance may counter the benefits of increased device density --...
Quantum dot cellular automata (QCA) is one of the emerging nanotechnologies for the design of next generation nanocomputing systems. However, excessive defects at the device level are expected to become a fundamental obstacle for achieving reliable computation in QCA-based integrated systems. In this paper, we present an information-theoretic approach to investigate the relationship between defect...
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...
Sets of Pairs of Functions to be Distinguished (SPFD) is a functional flexibility representation method that was recently introduced in the logic synthesis domain, and promises superiority in exploring the flexibility offered by a design over all previous representation methods. In this work, we illustrate how the SPFD of a particular wire reveals information regarding the number of potential transient...
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...
Process scaling is well know to increase overall chip-level soft error rates (SER) if no additional mitigation techniques are applied [Seifert04]. The purpose of this study is to summarize recent investigations conducted by the author to characterize the SER benefits and limitations of one particular SER mitigation technique: radiation hardened sequentials that utilize local redundancy. The studied...
In this paper a BISR architecture for embedded memories is presented. The proposed scheme utilises a multiple bank cache-like memory for repairs. Statistical analysis is used for minimisation of the total resources required to achieve a very high fault coverage. Simulation results show that the proposed BISR scheme is characterised by high efficiency and low area overhead, even for high defect densities...
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...
In this paper, we present a new technique to improve the reliability of H-tree SRAM memories. This technique deals with the SRAM power-bus monitoring by using built-in current sensor (BICS) circuits that detect abnormal current dissipation in the memory power-bus. This abnormal current is the result of a single-event upset (SEU) in the memory and it is generated during the inversion of the state of...
Built-in self test (BIST) and built-in self repair (BISR) techniques have been developed for memory blocks in recent years. Such techniques are suited to enhance production yield, but also to facilitate long-term dependable circuits though self repair in the field of application. BISR for logic circuits has shown to be much more complex, for which only a few approaches have been published so far....
Timing-error detection and recovery circuits are implemented in a 65 nm resilient circuit test-chip to eliminate the clock frequency guardband from dynamic supply voltage (VCC) and temperature variations as well as to exploit path-activation probabilities for maximizing throughput. Two error-detection sequential (EDS) circuits are introduced to preserve the timing-error detection capability of previous...
This paper describes a methodology for building a reliable internet core router that considers the vulnerability of its electronic components to single event upset (SEU). It begins with a set of meaningful system level metrics that can be related to product reliability requirements. A specification is then defined that can be effectively used during the system architecture, silicon and software design...
In this paper, we propose a distributed voting strategy to design a robust NMR system. We show that using inexpensive current-based drivers and buffers, we can completely eliminate the centralized voter unit and do the majority voting among N modules in a distributed fashion. Our strategy achieves high reliability that is vital for future nano systems in which high defect rate is expected. Experimental...
Predicted device reliability for nanoelectronics indicates that redundant design will be necessary to build reliable nanosystems. Up to date, several fault tolerant techniques have been proposed and analyzed. However, the fabrication complexity of those circuits, which directly affects the final circuit reliability, is not usually considered. In this paper, we compare two fault tolerant techniques,...
To make digital circuits with unreliable devices more reliable has been a big challenge, especially for today's nanoelectronic circuit design. This paper presents a gate replication architecture towards increasing the reliability of individual nano-scale digital logic gates. We focus on deriving the fundamental relationship between gate replication and reliability improvement, and report both theoretical...
This paper investigates the behaviors of multi-island structure as an alternative redundancy scheme for single-electron tunneling (SET) based digital circuits. In particular, we focus on an SET logic gate (2-input NAND gate) to explore the role of this structure in improving the immunity against random background charges. Also discussed are the parameter selection with multi-island structure, and...
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