Efficient analysis of single event transients q

The effects of charged particles striking VLSI circuits and producing single event transients (SETs) are becoming an issue for designers who exploit deep sub-micron technologies; efficient and accurate techniques for assessing their impact on VLSI designs are thus needed. This paper presents a new approach for generating the list of faults to be addressed during fault injection experiments tackling SET effects, which resorts to static timing analysis. Moreover, it proposes a simplified SET fault model, which is suitable for being adopted within a zero-delay fault simulation tool. Experimental results are reported on both standard benchmarks and real-life circuits assessing the effectiveness of the proposed techniques. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.