A Refined Electrical Model for Particle Strikes and its Impact on SEU Prediction

Decreasing feature sizes have led to an increased vulnerability of random logic to soft errors. A particle strike may cause a glitch or single event transient (SET) at the output of a gate, which in turn can propagate to a register and cause a single event upset (SEU) there. Circuit level modeling and analysis of SETs provides an attractive compromise between computationally expensive simulations at device level and less accurate techniques at higher levels. At the circuit level particle strikes crossing a pn-junction are traditionally modeled with the help of a transient current source. However, the common models assume a constant voltage across the pn-junction, which may lead to inaccurate predictions concerning the shape of expected glitches. To overcome this problem, a refined circuit level model for strikes through pn-junctions is investigated and validated in this paper. The refined model yields significantly different results than common models. This has a considerable impact on SEU prediction, which is confirmed by extensive simulations at gate level. In most cases, the refined, more realistic, model reveals an almost doubled risk of a system failure after an SET.