Single-Event Transient Analysis in High Speed Circuits

The effect of Single-Event Transients (SETs) (at a combinational node of a design) on the system reliability is becoming a big concern for ICs manufactured using advanced technologies. An SET at a node of a combinational part of a circuit may propagate as a transient pulse at the input of a flip-flop and consequently latches in the flip-flop, thus generating a soft-error. When an SET is combined with a transition at a node (i.e., dynamic behavior of that node) along a critical path of the combinational part of a design, a transient delay fault may occur at the input of a circuit flip-flop. Using the Probability Density Function (PDF) of an SET, this paper proposes a statistical method to compute the probability of soft-errors caused by SETs considering dynamic behavior of a circuit.