A New Approach to the Analysis of Single Event Transients in VLSI Circuits

  • Authors:
  • M. Sonza Reorda;M. Violante

  • Affiliations:
  • Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy. www.cad.polito.it;Dipartimento di Automatica e Informatica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy. www.cad.polito.it

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Single event transients (SETs) on combinational gates are becoming an issue in deep sub-micron technologies, thus efficient and accurate techniques for assessing their impact are strongly required. This paper presents a new technique that embeds time-related information in the topology of the analyzed circuit, allowing evaluating the effects of SETs via zero-delay simulation instead of timed simulation. The analysis of complex designs becomes thus possible at a very limited cost in terms of CPU time. Moreover, circuits enriched with time-related information are suitable for hardware emulation thus allowing further reducing the time for SET-effect analysis, while providing the same accuracy of state-of-the-art approaches based on timed simulations. The paper reports results showing how the proposed method can be effectively used to analyze complex designs.