Quantitative evaluation of register vulnerabilities in RTL control paths

Author

Liang Chen ; Ebrahimi, Mojtaba ; Tahoori, Mehdi B.

Author_Institution

Karlsruhe Inst. of Technol., Karlsruhe, Germany

fYear

2014

fDate

26-30 May 2014

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

2

Abstract

Radiation-induced soft error is a significant reliability issue in nanoscale technology nodes. In this paper, a novel approach based on probabilistic model checking is proposed to quantify the soft error vulnerabilities of the registers in the control paths at the Register-Transfer Level (RTL). Efficient abstraction and model simplification techniques are proposed to significantly improve the scalability of our method. The experimental results show the effectiveness of proposed techniques to successfully quantify the register vulnerabilities in the RTL design, to be used for cost-effective selective register protection.

Keywords

flip-flops; radiation hardening (electronics); RTL control paths; RTL design; efficient abstraction techniques; model simplification techniques; nanoscale technology nodes; probabilistic model checking; quantitative evaluation; radiation-induced soft error; register vulnerabilities; register-transfer level; selective register protection; soft error vulnerabilities; Benchmark testing; Error analysis; Europe; Model checking; Probabilistic logic; Registers; Scalability;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Test Symposium (ETS), 2014 19th IEEE European

Conference_Location

Paderborn

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ETS.2014.6847837

Filename

6847837