Process variability-aware transient fault modeling and analysis

ABSTRACT

Due to reduction in device feature size and supply voltage, the sensitivity of digital systems to transient faults is increasing dramatically. As technology scales further, the increase in transistor integration capacity also leads to the increase in process and environmental variations. Despite these difficulties, it is expected that systems remain reliable while delivering the required performance. Reliability and variability are emerging as new design challenges, thus pointing to the importance of modeling and analysis of transient faults and variation sources for the purpose of guiding the design process. This work presents a symbolic approach to modeling the effect of transient faults in digital circuits in the presence of variability due to process manufacturing. The results show that using a nominal case and not including variability effects, can underestimate the SER by 5% for the 50% yield point and by 10% for the 90% yield point.

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