Single Event Effects on Digital Integrated Circuits: Origins and Mitigation Techniques

New generation electronic devices have become more and more sensitive to the effects of the natural radiation coming from the surrounding environment. These radiation sources are cosmic rays and radioactive impurities, able to corrupt the content of memory cells or to induce transient pulses in combinational logic. The growing sensitivity seems to be related to two main factors: the lower and lower charge needed to define the logic levels in advanced devices and the increasing number of basic components inside the modern integrated circuits. In this paper, are described state-of-art techniques to mitigate these effects as well as typical tests to verify the radiation-tolerance of the devices and/or systems.