Built-In Soft Error Resilience for Robust System Design

Built-in soft error resilience (BISER) is an architecture-aware circuit design technique for correcting soft errors in latches, flip-flops and combinational logic. BISER enables more than an order of magnitude reduction in chip-level soft error rate with minimal area impact, 6-10% chip-level power impact, and 1-5% performance impact (depending on whether combinational logic error correction is implemented or not). In comparison, several traditional error-detection techniques introduce 40-100% power, performance and area penalties, and require significant efforts for designing and validating corresponding recovery mechanisms. In addition, BISER enables system design with configurable soft error protection features. Such features are extremely important for future designs targeting applications with a wide range of power, performance and reliability constraints. Design trade-offs associated with BISER and other existing soft error protection techniques are also analyzed.