Architecture Design For Soft Errors

This book provides a comprehensive description of the architetural techniques to tackle the soft error problem. It covers the new methodologies for quantitative analysis of soft errors as well as novel, cost-effective architectural techniques to mitigate them. To provide readers with a better grasp of the broader problem deffinition and solution space, this book also delves into the physics of soft errors and reviews current circuit and software mitigation techniques. TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Device- and Circuit-Level Modeling, Measurement, and Mitigation Chapter 3: Architectural Vulnerability Analysis Chapter 4: Advanced Architectural Vulnerability Analysis Chapter 5: Error Coding Techniques Chapter 6: Fault Detection via Redundant Execution Chapter 7: Hardware Error Recovery Chapter 8: Software Detection and Recovery * Provides the methodologies necessary to quantify the effect of radiation-induced soft errors as well as state-of-the-art techniques to protect against them

Architecture Design for Soft Errors provides a comprehensive description of the architectural techniques to tackle the soft error problem. It covers the new methodologies for quantitative analysis of soft errors as well as novel, cost-effective architectural techniques to mitigate them. To provide readers with a better grasp of the broader problem definition and solution space, this book also delves into the physics of soft errors and reviews current circuit and software mitigation techniques. There are a number of different ways this book can be read or used in a course: as a complete course on architecture design for soft errors covering the entire book; a short course on architecture design for soft errors; and as a reference book on classical fault-tolerant machines. This book is recommended for practitioners in semi-conductor industry, researchers and developers in computer architecture, advanced graduate seminar courses on soft errors, and (iv) as a reference book for undergraduate courses in computer architecture. Helps readers build-in fault tolerance to the billions of microchips produced each year, all of which are subject to soft errors Shows readers how to quantify their soft error reliability Provides state-of-the-art techniques to protect against soft errors

Soft errors are a multifaceted issue at the crossroads of applied physics and engineering sciences. Soft errors are by nature multiscale and multiphysics problems that combine not only nuclear and semiconductor physics, material sciences, circuit design, and chip architecture and operation, but also cosmic-ray physics, natural radioactivity issues, particle detection, and related instrumentation. Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits addresses the problem of soft errors in digital integrated circuits subjected to the terrestrial natural radiation environment—one of the most important primary limits for modern digital electronic reliability. Covering the fundamentals of soft errors as well as engineering considerations and technological aspects, this robust text: Discusses the basics of the natural radiation environment, particle interactions with matter, and soft-error mechanisms Details instrumentation developments in the fields of environment characterization, particle detection, and real-time and accelerated tests Describes the latest computational developments, modeling, and simulation strategies for the soft error-rate estimation in digital circuits Explores trends for future technological nodes and emerging devices Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits presents the state of the art of this complex subject, providing comprehensive knowledge of the complete chain of the physics of soft errors. The book makes an ideal text for introductory graduate-level courses, offers academic researchers a specialized overview, and serves as a practical guide for semiconductor industry engineers or application engineers.

Soft errors are a multifaceted issue at the crossroads of applied physics and engineering sciences. Soft errors are by nature multiscale and multiphysics problems that combine not only nuclear and semiconductor physics, material sciences, circuit design, and chip architecture and operation, but also cosmic-ray physics, natural radioactivity issues, particle detection, and related instrumentation. Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits addresses the problem of soft errors in digital integrated circuits subjected to the terrestrial natural radiation environment—one of the most important primary limits for modern digital electronic reliability. Covering the fundamentals of soft errors as well as engineering considerations and technological aspects, this robust text: Discusses the basics of the natural radiation environment, particle interactions with matter, and soft-error mechanisms Details instrumentation developments in the fields of environment characterization, particle detection, and real-time and accelerated tests Describes the latest computational developments, modeling, and simulation strategies for the soft error-rate estimation in digital circuits Explores trends for future technological nodes and emerging devices Soft Errors: From Particles to Circuits presents the state of the art of this complex subject, providing comprehensive knowledge of the complete chain of the physics of soft errors. The book makes an ideal text for introductory graduate-level courses, offers academic researchers a specialized overview, and serves as a practical guide for semiconductor industry engineers or application engineers.

This book describes the benefits and drawbacks inherent in the use of virtual platforms (VPs) to perform fast and early soft error assessment of multicore systems. The authors show that VPs provide engineers with appropriate means to investigate new and more efficient fault injection and mitigation techniques. Coverage also includes the use of machine learning techniques (e.g., linear regression) to speed-up the soft error evaluation process by pinpointing parameters (e.g., architectural) with the most substantial impact on the software stack dependability. This book provides valuable information and insight through more than 3 million individual scenarios and 2 million simulation-hours. Further, this book explores machine learning techniques usage to navigate large fault injection datasets.

This book is intended for readers who are interested in the design of robust and reliable electronic digital systems. The authors cover emerging trends in design of today’s reliable electronic systems which are applicable to safety-critical applications, such as automotive or healthcare electronic systems. The emphasis is on modeling approaches and algorithms for analysis and mitigation of soft errors in nano-scale CMOS digital circuits, using techniques that are the cornerstone of Computer Aided Design (CAD) of reliable VLSI circuits. The authors introduce software tools for analysis and mitigation of soft errors in electronic systems, which can be integrated easily with design flows. In addition to discussing soft error aware analysis techniques for combinational logic, the authors also describe new soft error mitigation strategies targeting commercial digital circuits. Coverage includes novel Soft Error Rate (SER) analysis techniques such as process variation aware SER estimation and GPU accelerated SER analysis techniques, in addition to SER reduction methods such as gate sizing and logic restructuring based SER techniques.

Shrinking feature size and diminishing supply voltage are making circuits sensitive to supply voltage fluctuations within the microprocessor, caused by normal workload activity changes. If left unattended, voltage fluctuations can lead to timing violations or even transistor lifetime issues that degrade processor robustness. Mechanisms that learn to tolerate, avoid, and eliminate voltage fluctuations based on program and microarchitectural events can help steer the processor clear of danger, thus enabling tighter voltage margins that improve performance or lower power consumption. We describe the problem of voltage variation and the factors that influence this variation during processor design and operation. We also describe a variety of runtime hardware and software mitigation techniques that either tolerate, avoid, and/or eliminate voltage violations. We hope processor architects will find the information useful since tolerance, avoidance, and elimination are generalizable constructs that can serve as a basis for addressing other reliability challenges as well. Table of Contents: Introduction / Modeling Voltage Variation / Understanding the Characteristics of Voltage Variation / Traditional Solutions and Emerging Solution Forecast / Allowing and Tolerating Voltage Emergencies / Predicting and Avoiding Voltage Emergencies / Eliminiating Recurring Voltage Emergencies / Future Directions on Resiliency

This book provides a comprehensive presentation of the most advanced research results and technological developments enabling understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft errors effect in advanced electronics, including the fundamental physical mechanisms of radiation induced soft errors, the various steps that lead to a system failure, the modelling and simulation of soft error at various levels (including physical, electrical, netlist, event driven, RTL, and system level modelling and simulation), hardware fault injection, accelerated radiation testing and natural environment testing, soft error oriented test structures, process-level, device-level, cell-level, circuit-level, architectural-level, software level and system level soft error mitigation techniques. The book contains a comprehensive presentation of most recent advances on understanding, qualifying and mitigating the soft error effect in advanced electronic systems, presented by academia and industry experts in reliability, fault tolerance, EDA, processor, SoC and system design, and in particular, experts from industries that have faced the soft error impact in terms of product reliability and related business issues and were in the forefront of the countermeasures taken by these companies at multiple levels in order to mitigate the soft error effects at a cost acceptable for commercial products. In a fast moving field, where the impact on ground level electronics is very recent and its severity is steadily increasing at each new process node, impacting one after another various industry sectors (as an example, the Automotive Electronics Council comes to publish qualification requirements on soft errors), research and technology developments and industrial practices have evolve very fast, outdating the most recent books edited at 2004.