Soft errors are a multifaceted issue at the crossroads of applied physics and engineering sciences. Soft errors are by nature multiscale and multiphysics problems that combine not only nuclear and semiconductor physics, material sciences, circuit design, and chip architecture and operation, but also cosmic-ray physics, natural radioactivity issues, particle detection, and related instrumentation. Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits addresses the problem of soft errors in digital integrated circuits subjected to the terrestrial natural radiation environment—one of the most important primary limits for modern digital electronic reliability. Covering the fundamentals of soft errors as well as engineering considerations and technological aspects, this robust text: Discusses the basics of the natural radiation environment, particle interactions with matter, and soft-error mechanisms Details instrumentation developments in the fields of environment characterization, particle detection, and real-time and accelerated tests Describes the latest computational developments, modeling, and simulation strategies for the soft error-rate estimation in digital circuits Explores trends for future technological nodes and emerging devices Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits presents the state of the art of this complex subject, providing comprehensive knowledge of the complete chain of the physics of soft errors. The book makes an ideal text for introductory graduate-level courses, offers academic researchers a specialized overview, and serves as a practical guide for semiconductor industry engineers or application engineers.

Architecture Design for Soft Errors provides a comprehensive description of the architectural techniques to tackle the soft error problem. It covers the new methodologies for quantitative analysis of soft errors as well as novel, cost-effective architectural techniques to mitigate them. To provide readers with a better grasp of the broader problem definition and solution space, this book also delves into the physics of soft errors and reviews current circuit and software mitigation techniques. There are a number of different ways this book can be read or used in a course: as a complete course on architecture design for soft errors covering the entire book; a short course on architecture design for soft errors; and as a reference book on classical fault-tolerant machines. This book is recommended for practitioners in semi-conductor industry, researchers and developers in computer architecture, advanced graduate seminar courses on soft errors, and (iv) as a reference book for undergraduate courses in computer architecture. - Helps readers build-in fault tolerance to the billions of microchips produced each year, all of which are subject to soft errors - Shows readers how to quantify their soft error reliability - Provides state-of-the-art techniques to protect against soft errors

Soft errors are a multifaceted issue at the crossroads of applied physics and engineering sciences. Soft errors are by nature multiscale and multiphysics problems that combine not only nuclear and semiconductor physics, material sciences, circuit design, and chip architecture and operation, but also cosmic-ray physics, natural radioactivity issues, particle detection, and related instrumentation. Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits addresses the problem of soft errors in digital integrated circuits subjected to the terrestrial natural radiation environment—one of the most important primary limits for modern digital electronic reliability. Covering the fundamentals of soft errors as well as engineering considerations and technological aspects, this robust text: Discusses the basics of the natural radiation environment, particle interactions with matter, and soft-error mechanisms Details instrumentation developments in the fields of environment characterization, particle detection, and real-time and accelerated tests Describes the latest computational developments, modeling, and simulation strategies for the soft error-rate estimation in digital circuits Explores trends for future technological nodes and emerging devices Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits presents the state of the art of this complex subject, providing comprehensive knowledge of the complete chain of the physics of soft errors. The book makes an ideal text for introductory graduate-level courses, offers academic researchers a specialized overview, and serves as a practical guide for semiconductor industry engineers or application engineers.

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of the most advanced research results and technological developments enabling understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft errors effect in advanced electronics, including the fundamental physical mechanisms of radiation induced soft errors, the various steps that lead to a system failure, the modelling and simulation of soft error at various levels (including physical, electrical, netlist, event driven, RTL, and system level modelling and simulation), hardware fault injection, accelerated radiation testing and natural environment testing, soft error oriented test structures, process-level, device-level, cell-level, circuit-level, architectural-level, software level and system level soft error mitigation techniques. The book contains a comprehensive presentation of most recent advances on understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft error effect in advanced electronic systems, presented by academia and industry experts in reliability, fault tolerance, EDA, processor, SoC and system design, and in particular, experts from industries that have faced the soft error impact in terms of product reliability and related business issues and were in the forefront of the countermeasures taken by these companies at multiple levels in order to mitigate the soft error effects at a cost acceptable for commercial products. In a fast moving field, where the impact on ground level electronics is very recent and its severity is steadily increasing at each new process node, impacting one after another various industry sectors (as an example, the Automotive Electronics Council comes to publish qualification requirements on soft errors), research and technology developments and industrial practices have evolve very fast, outdating the most recent books edited at 2004.

This book provides a detailed treatment of radiation effects in electronic devices, including effects at the material, device, and circuit levels. The emphasis is on transient effects caused by single ionizing particles (single-event effects and soft errors) and effects produced by the cumulative energy deposited by the radiation (total ionizing dose effects). Bipolar (Si and SiGe), metalOCooxideOCosemiconductor (MOS), and compound semiconductor technologies are discussed. In addition to considering the specific issues associated with high-performance devices and technologies, the book includes the background material necessary for understanding radiation effects at a more general level. Contents: Single Event Effects in Avionics and on the Ground (E Normand); Soft Errors in Commercial Integrated Circuits (R C Baumann); System Level Single Event Upset Mitigation Strategies (W F Heidergott); Space Radiation Effects in Optocouplers (R A Reed et al.); The Effects of Space Radiation Exposure on Power MOSFETs: A Review (K Shenai et al.); Total Dose Effects in Linear Bipolar Integrated Circuits (H J Barnaby); Hardness Assurance for Commercial Microelectronics (R L Pease); Switching Oxide Traps (T R Oldham); Online and Realtime Dosimetry Using Optically Stimulated Luminescence (L Dusseau & J Gasiot); and other articles. Readership: Practitioners, researchers, managers and graduate students in electrical and electronic engineering, semiconductor science and technology, and microelectronics."

This book provides a detailed treatment of radiation effects in electronic devices, including effects at the material, device, and circuit levels. The emphasis is on transient effects caused by single ionizing particles (single-event effects and soft errors) and effects produced by the cumulative energy deposited by the radiation (total ionizing dose effects). Bipolar (Si and SiGe), metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS), and compound semi-conductor technologies are discussed. In addition to considering the specific issues associated with high-performance devices and technologies, the book includes the background material necessary for understanding radiation effects at a more general level.

This book evaluates the influence of process variations (e.g. work-function fluctuations) and radiation-induced soft errors in a set of logic cells using FinFET technology, considering the 7nm technological node as a case study. Moreover, for accurate soft error estimation, the authors adopt a radiation event generator tool (MUSCA SEP3), which deals both with layout features and electrical properties of devices. The authors also explore four circuit-level techniques (e.g. transistor reordering, decoupling cells, Schmitt Trigger, and sleep transistor) as alternatives to attenuate the unwanted effects on FinFET logic cells. This book also evaluates the mitigation tendency when different levels of process variation, transistor sizing, and radiation particle characteristics are applied in the design. An overall comparison of all methods addressed by this work is provided allowing to trace a trade-off between the reliability gains and the design penalties of each approach regarding the area, performance, power consumption, single event transient (SET) pulse width, and SET cross-section.