Soft-Errors Phenomenon Impacts on Design for Reliability Technologies

Summary form only given. We mainly address here the "alter ego" of quality, which is reliability, and is becoming a growing concern for designers using the latest technologies. After the DFM nodes in 90 nm and 65 nm, we are entering the DFR area, or design for reliability straddling from 65 nm to 45 nm and beyond. Because of the randomness character of reliability - failures can happen anytime anywhere - executives should mitigate reliability problems in terms of risk, which costs include cost of recalls, warranty costs, and loss of goodwill. Taking as an example the soft error phenomenon, we demonstrate how the industry first started to respond to this new technology scaling problem with silicon test to measure and understand the issue, but should quickly move to resolving reliability issues early in the design. In this field, designers can largely benefit from new EDA analysis tools and specific IPs to overcome in a timely and economical manner this new hurdle.