Exploiting Fault Model Correlations to Accelerate SEU Sensitivity Assessment

Nowadays, integrated circuit technologies are increasingly being more susceptible to ionizing radiation effects. In order to assess the reliability of a digital system performing a specific application and to identify the most critical failure effects, radiation experiments and fault injection campaigns are usually performed, which may be costly and time-expensive. This paper proposes a fully automated, practical methodology for accelerating Single-Event-Upset (SEU) fault injection campaigns in digital circuits. The main underlying principle is based on the correlation between the effects of the SEU fault model with the Stuck-At (SA) one. Circuital and functional analysis and experimental case studies confirm the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.