Soft error rate reduction using redundancy addition and removal

Kai-Chiang Wu, Diana Marculescu

Abstract: Due to current technology scaling trends such as shrinking feature sizes and reducing supply voltages, circuit reliability has become more susceptible to radiation-induced transient faults (soft errors). Soft errors, which have been a great concern in memories, are now a main factor in reliability degradation of logic circuits. In this paper, we propose a novel framework based on redundancy addition and removal (RAR) for soft error rate (SER) reduction. Several metrics and constraints are introduced to guide our proposed framework towards SER reduction in an efficient manner. Experimental results show that up to 70% reduction in output failure probability can be achieved with relatively low area overhead.