Soft Error Rate Analysis for Sequential Circuits

Due to reduction in device feature size and supply voltage, the sensitivity to radiation induced transient faults (soft errors) of digital systems increases dramatically. Intensive research has been done so far in modeling and analysis of combinational circuit susceptibility to soft errors, while sequential circuits have received much less attention. In this paper, we present an approach for evaluating the susceptibility of sequential circuits to soft errors. The proposed approach uses symbolic modeling based on BDDs/ADDs and probabilistic sequential circuit analysis. The SER evaluation is demonstrated by the set of experimental results, which show that, for most of the benchmarks used, the SER decreases well below a given threshold (10^-7 FIT) within ten clock cycles after the hit. The results obtained with the proposed symbolic framework are within 4% average error and up to 11000X faster when compared to HSPICE detailed circuit simulation