A new fault injection method for evaluation of combining SEU and SET effects on circuit reliability

We propose a new dual-level fault injection method for evaluating combination effect of single event upsets (SEUs) and single event transients (SETs). The proposed interaction method allows collaborative simulation on register-transfer level (RTL) and gate level. Conventional fault injection methods or fault model techniques typically aim at SEUs or SETs, rather than the combination of SETs and SEUs. As a logic depth and clock period decrease, SEUs and SET are likely to co-exist, which further challenges circuit reliability. To facilitate the investigation of advanced SEU and SET management methods, our fault injection method considers both SETs and SEUs. We apply the proposed method to two ITC´99 benchmark circuits to analyze the mutual masking effect between SETs and SEUs. Simulations performed on the two circuits show that SET duration time is the dominant factor affecting the mutual masking effect. If SEU duration time changes (but not beyond one cycle), the maximum masked error ratio is up to five times the minimum masked error ratio. We also observed that doubling clock frequency results in the average masked error ratio varying from 3% to 10%.