Modeling and verification of single event transients in deep submicron technologies

Digital single event transients (DSETs) are becoming an increasing concern for deep submicron ICs. As device feature sizes shrink, digital circuits become faster, have smaller parasitics, and become more susceptible to single event effects (SEEs). If an ionizing particle creates enough charge to be collected on a node within a combinatorial gate, a transient pulse will be formed that may propagate through the circuit and be latched in as bad data. In order to predict the response of a circuit to a single event, people have long used circuit and device level simulations. In this paper, we show that when dealing with deep submicron technologies, knowing the pulse structure of the transient is crucial to predicting its propagation distance accurately.