On latching probability of particle induced transients incombinational networks

摘要

The question to what extent particle induced transients incombinational parts of a circuit propagate into memory elements isaddressed in this paper An experimental method is presented in which theproportion of bit flips originating from heavy-ion hits in combinationallogic is determined. It is proposed that a voltage pulse may onlypropagate through a limited number of transistor stages and still belatched. The proportion of all transients in combinational logic thatwere latched into registers was experimentally, estimated to be between0.7·10-3 and 2·10-3 for a customdesigned CMOS circuit. Very few multiple bit flips were observed duringthe experiments which indicates that the single bit flip model used inmany high-level simulations is reasonable accurate