Soft Errors in Modern Electronic Systems

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of the most advanced research results and technological developments enabling understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft errors effect in advanced electronics, including the fundamental physical mechanisms of radiation induced soft errors, the various steps that lead to a system failure, the modelling and simulation of soft error at various levels (including physical, electrical, netlist, event driven, RTL, and system level modelling and simulation), hardware fault injection, accelerated radiation testing and natural environment testing, soft error oriented test structures, process-level, device-level, cell-level, circuit-level, architectural-level, software level and system level soft error mitigation techniques.

The book contains a comprehensive presentation of most recent advances on understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft error effect in advanced electronic systems, presented by academia and industry expertsin reliability, fault tolerance, EDA, processor, SoC and system design, and in particular, experts from industries that have faced the soft error impact in terms of product reliability and related business issues and were in the forefront of the countermeasures taken by these companies at multiple levels in order to mitigate the soft error effects at a cost acceptable for commercial products. In a fast moving field, where the impact on ground level electronics is very recent and its severity is steadily increasing at each new process node, impacting one after another various industry sectors (as an example, the Automotive Electronics Council comes to publish qualification requirements on soft errors), research and technology developments and industrial practices have evolve very fast, outdating the most recent books edited at 2004.

Soft Errors in Modern Electronic Systems describes the state-of-the-art developments and open issues in the field of soft errors. This work not only highlights a comprehensive presentation of soft errors related issues and challenges but also presents the most efficient solutions, methodologies and tools. The eleven chapters written by highly qualified experts provide a comprehensive description of the complex chain of the physical processes leading to the occurrence of soft errors, as well as of the numerous techniques and tools enabling the SER qualification of electronic systems during the design phase and after production, including: nuclear reactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere (neutron and proton generation at ground level); nuclear reactions of atmospheric neutrons and protons with die atoms (secondary particles generation); coulomb interaction (ionization); device physics (charge collection); electrical simulation; event driven simulation; logic domain simulation; RTLsimulation; hardware emulation, and radiation testing. The book also provides a comprehensive description of various hardware and software techniques enabling soft-error mitigation at moderate cost. Soft Errors in Modern Electronic Systems is a useful book for circuit and system designers, researchers, students and professors.