Soft-Error-Transition/Soft-Error-Upset Co-Tolerant Arithmetic Circuit Design and Chip Implementation-Ii

With the progress of CMOS process technology, the design complexity and the transistor density in SoC systems increase rapidly, whereas the power supply voltage also decreases rapidly. It leads to the Soft-Error Rate (SER) in SoC designs also increasing rapidly, the reliability in arithmetic circuits decreased as well. Therefore, the SET/SEU tolerant design becomes the major challenge in SoC designs in the nano-scale era. However, individual SEU-tolerant sequential circuit designs and SET-tolerant arithmetic circuit designs cannot meet the requirement in a practical system because the soft-error propagation chains are not broken and the overall soft-error tolerance would be greatly lowered. In this project, we expect to develop SET/SEU-tolerant co-design to enhance the soft-error immunity in the arithmetic circuits. We will also implement the proposed SET/SEU-tolerant arithmetic circuits through TSMC 28nm CMOS process to verify and demonstrate the ability in SET/SEU tolerance.　In SEU-tolerant sequential circuit designs, we will develop a vector-ganged CLK protection technique in the SEU-isolated latch designs. In this way, we can ensure SEU problems not been converted to SET-propagation problems. In SET-tolerant arithmetic circuit/architecture designs, we develop an error-reshaping technique to overcome the bottleneck of SET accumulation and SET induced SEU issues. Moreover, we expect to break through the limitation of SET-tolerant arithmetic architecture cannot be adopted in feed-back DSP systems and propose a unified SET/SEU tolerant design that can be applied into both feed-forward and feed-back DSP systems. In this way, we can ensure SET errors not been acculturated as serious SEU problems. More important, we go further to design the soft-error-tolerant mechanism for protecting the clock signal and main control signals in system integration level. In this way, we can improvement SET-tolerance with guaranteed signal quality, which can ensure the SET-tolerant ability still be preserved after circuit integration. In this project, we will develop a unified SET/SEU-tolerant FIR/IIR/FFT/ME chip designs that can support in both feed-forward and feed-back DSP systems in TSMC 28nm CMOS process. By adopting the inherent existing spatial/temporal redundancy with spatial/temporal redundancy sharing and feed-forward/feed-back interleaving processing, we can widely extend the application field of SET/SEU co-tolerant designs. Moreover, the blind spots on CLK/control signals can be removed in the proposed SET/SEU-tolerant chip designs and the overall system soft-error immunity can be greatly enhanced.

Project ID:PB10708-1625
External Project ID:MOST107-2221-E182-060