Cascaded Propagation and Reduction Techniques for Fault Binary Decision Diagram in Single-event Transient Analysis

Abstract

Abstract-Single Event Transient has a critical impact on highly integrated logic circuits which are currently common in various commercial and consumer electronic devices. Reliability against the soft and intermittent faults will become a key metric to evaluate such complex system on chip designs. Our previous work analyzing soft errors was focused on parallelizing and optimizing error propagation procedures for individual transient faults on logic and sequential cells. In this paper, we present a new propagation technique where a fault binary decision diagram (BDD) continues to merge every new fault generated from the subsequent logic gate traversal. BDD-based transient fault analysis has been known to provide the most accurate results that consider both electrical and logical properties for the given design. However, it suffers from a limitation in storing and handling BDDs that can be increased in size and operations by the exponential order. On the other hand, the proposed method requires only a visit to each logic gate traversal and unnecessary BDDs can be removed or reduced. This results in an approximately 20-200 fold speed increase while the existing parallelized procedure is only 3-4 times faster than the baseline algorithm.