Soft Errors from Space to Ground: Historical Overview, Empirical Evidence, and Future Trends

Abstract

Soft errors induced by radiation, which started as a rather exotic failure mechanism causing anomalies in satellite equipment, have become one of the most challenging issues that impact the reliability of modern electronic systems, also in ground-level applications. Many efforts have been spent in the last decades to measure, model, and mitigate radiation effects, applying numerous techniques approaching the problem at various abstraction levels. This chapter presents a historical overview of the soft-error subject and treats several "disaster stories" from the past. Furthermore, scaling trends are discussed for the most sensitive circuit types.

Logic synthesis of assertions for saftey-critical applications

“…However, SRAM cells are particularly vulnerable to particle hits caused by (cosmic) radiation, which tend to cause permanent (until the FPGA is reconfigured) bit flips in the FPGA configuration and useraccessible SRAM. This potentially results in erroneous circuit behavior [7]. The effects of these so-called soft errors (as they are reversible in contrast to hard errors which occur in the manufacturing process or as a result of component aging [12]) can be reduced by using either (a) FPGA architectures which are less susceptible to particle hits ( [11], [13]), or (b) utilizing approaches which dynamically reconfigure soft error affected configuration partitions of a FPGA [14].…”

“…Additionally, fault removal in the form of verification, fault location and correction (i.e., debugging, runtime-verification) in the design phase, and maintenance in the operational phase must be performed to ensure correct functionality [6]. Considering FPGAs, hazardous events may generally stem from either (a) unavoidable induced environmental hazards such as (cosmic) radiation [7], or (b) applicationspecific hazards, for example too high water pressure on a water turbine due to floodwaters. As a consequence, the particular product has to implement corrective or protective mechanisms to prevent hazardous events from arising, or to mitigate the consequences of an arising hazardous event.…”

Using Approximate Computing and Selective Hardening for the Reduction of Overheads in the Design of Radiation-Induced Fault-Tolerant Systems

“…The effects of SEEs can be permanent or transient. The latter are known as 'soft errors' [2]. If the impact of a high energy particle causes the generation of an electron-hole pair, a bit flip may occur.…”

“…Therefore, mission critical systems need to be protected against this kind of fault. while these faults may be transient (also known as soft errors) and not only permanent, they might affect the behavior of the system, causing malfunctions or crashes in modern electronic systems [2,3].…”

Providing Integrity in Real-Time Networks-on-Chip

“…BERs derived[55] for sequential and combinational logic with data from[56] for 65nm CMOS SRAM. Masking effects[57] are not taken into account.…”