Quantifying the Effectiveness of Guard Bands in Reducing the Collected Charge Leading to Soft Errors

Soft errors pose a major reliability threat to advanced electronic components and systems. Novel techniques are needed to mitigate the soft error rate (SER) of integrated circuits (ICs) and in some cases a combination of different mitigation techniques may be required for significant performance improvements. In this work, an autonomous single event transient (SET) pulse-width characterization technique is used to quantify the effect of guard bands in reducing the collected charge and SER of integrated circuits. Inclusion of guard bands is a simple approach for radiation hardening by design (RHBD). Experiment results on a 0.35-mum technology show reduced SET pulse-width for devices with guard bands; the corresponding reduction in SER was estimated to be greater than 55% for technologies ranging from 0.35-mum to 0.07-mum.