A fast and accurate multi-cycle soft error rate estimation approach to resilient embedded systems design

In this paper, we propose a very fast and accurate analytical approach to estimate the overall SER and to identify the most vulnerable gates, flip-flops, and paths of a circuit. Using such information, designers can selectively protect the vulnerable parts resulting in lower power and area overheads that are the most important factors in embedded systems. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed approach firstly does not rely on fault injection or fault simulation; secondly it measures the SER for multi cycles of circuit operation; thirdly, the proposed approach accurately computes all three masking factors, namely, logical, electrical, and timing masking; fourthly, the effects of error propagation in re-convergent fanouts are considered in the proposed approach. SERs estimated by the proposed approach for some ISCAS89 circuit benchmarks are compared with that estimated by the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation based fault injection approach. The results show that the proposed approach is about four orders of magnitude faster than the MC fault injection approach while having an accuracy of about 97%. This level of fastness and accuracy makes the proposed approach a viable solution to measure the SER of very large size circuits used in industry.