[Invited Talk] Reliability on Integrated Circuits -Details of Soft Errors-

According to aggressive process scaling, reliability issues on semiconductor devices are becoming dominant such as variability, temporal failure and aging degradation. Temporal failures are mainly caused by alpha particles from packages or neutrons from outer space. These particles generate electron-hole pairs to flip memory or flip-flops, which is so-called soft errors. Alpha particles can be generated from alpha sources such as Am241. It is easy to measure soft error tolerance to alpha particles in your laboratory by attaching an Am241 foil at the top of the DUT. On the other hand, white neutron beam which has similar but accelerated energy spectrum on the terrestrial region can be generated by accelerators. Thus, you have to bring the DUT and measurement instruments to the facility with the neutron accelerator. Redundant circuits are commonly utilized to mitigate soft errors. We introduce several mitigation techniques for soft errors.