Designing reliable circuit in the presence of soft errors

As technology scales, with ever shrinking geometries and higher density circuits, the issue of soft errors and reliability in a complex chip design is becoming a challenging design criterion. Soft errors are caused by radiation, which directly or indirectly induces a localized ionization capable of upsetting internal circuit states. While these errors can result in an upset event, the circuit itself is most often not damaged. Addressing soft error issues is important for a broad range of companies either because they incorporate many semiconductor devices that are prone to soft errors in their system or because they design embedded memories, FPGAs and microprocessors. This tutorial is targeted at researchers/industry practitioners who wish to gain a background on the soft error problem, the techniques that exist to counter this problem and future challenges that lie ahead.