Symbolic Simulation of the Propagation and Filtering of Transient Faulty Pulses

This paper is concerned with statically analyzing the susceptibility of arbitrary combinational circuits to single event upsets that are becoming a significant concern for reliability of commercial electronics. For the first time, a fast and accurate technique based on static, vector-less analysis of soft error rates (SER) in general combinational circuits is proposed. The analysis technique is targeted to cell-based designs and characterized by two essential features: (1) accurate error-pulse propagation and attenuation models of library cells that are based on STAlike pre-characterization methods; and (2) an efficient computational procedure for pulse propagation via encoding of the error-pulses with the binary decision diagrams (BDD). Both electrical and logical masking mechanisms of soft errors are accurately captured.