Design for soft error mitigation

In nanometric technologies, circuits are increasingly sensitive to various kinds of perturbations. Soft errors, a concern for space applications in the past, became a reliability issue at ground level. Alpha particles and atmospheric neutrons induce single-event upsets (SEU), affecting memory cells, latches, and flip-flops, and single-event transients (SET), initiated in the combinational logic and captured by the latches and flip-flops associated to the outputs of this logic. To face this challenge, a designer must dispose a variety of soft error mitigation schemes adapted to various circuit structures, design architectures, and design constraints. In this paper, we describe various SEU and SET mitigation schemes that could help the designer meet her or his goals.