IEICE Transactions on Electronics
Online ISSN : 1745-1353
Print ISSN : 0916-8524
Special Section on Solid-State Circuit Design — Architecture, Circuit, Device and Design Methodology
Analyzing Impacts of SRAM, FF and Combinational Circuit on Chip-Level Neutron-Induced Soft Error Rate
Wang LIAOMasanori HASHIMOTO
Author information
JOURNAL RESTRICTED ACCESS

2019 Volume E102.C Issue 4 Pages 296-302

Details
Abstract

Soft error jeopardizes the reliability of semiconductor devices, especially those working at low voltage. In recent years, silicon-on-thin-box (SOTB), which is a FD-SOI device, is drawing attention since it is suitable for ultra-low-voltage operation. This work evaluates the contributions of SRAM, FF and combinational circuit to chip-level soft error rate (SER) based on irradiation test results. For this evaluation, this work performed neutron irradiation test for characterizing single event transient (SET) rate of SOTB and bulk circuits at 0.5 V. Using the SBU and MCU data in SRAMs from previous work, we calculated the MBU rate with/without error correcting code (ECC) and with 1/2/4-col MUX interleaving. Combining FF error rates reported in literature, we estimated chip-level SER and each contribution to chip-level SER for embedded and high-performance processors. For both the processors, without ECC, 95% errors occur at SRAM in both SOTB and bulk chips at 0.5 V and 1.0 V, and the overall chip-level SERs of the assumed SOTB chip at 0.5 V is at least 10 x lower than that of bulk chip. On the other hand, when ECC is applied to SRAM in the SOTB chip, SEUs occurring at FFs are dominant in the high-performance processor while MBUs at SRAMs are not negligible in the bulk embedded chips.

Content from these authors
© 2019 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers
Previous article Next article
feedback
Top