Accurate Soft Error Rate Reduction using Modified Resolution Method

Alexander L. Stempkovskiy, Dmitry V. Telpukhov, Vladislav Nadolenko

Abstract: The influence of cosmic radiation on integrated circuits is one of the most important reliability challenges of modern semiconductor technologies, and the most significant problems are associated with single event effects. Consequently, even at the early stage of the logical synthesis of combinational circuits, it is necessary to take into account the requirements for the reliability of operation. The article proposes an iterative method of resynthesis of combinational circuits by using implicit don't cares. The extraction procedure of these don't cares is performed using a modified resolution method, which has been widely used in the field of automated reasoning and especially in automated theorem proving. The applicability of the iterative process is ensured by effective metrics and methods for evaluating the reliability of combinational circuits. The proposed approach differs from the known methods in the absence of errors in finding logical constraints and accurate estimation of the soft error rate (SER) at each iteration. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated on a large set of benchmark circuits.