Automatic selective hardening against soft errors: A cost-based and regularity-aware approach

This paper proposes a methodology to automatically apply selective hardening into a circuit based on the net hardening concept. Analysis is performed in the profile of a hardening cost function, in order to automatically determine a stop point for the hardening process. Such analysis can be, sometimes, very time consuming, and even intractable for large circuits. In order to overcome such limitation, two approaches are presented and combined in this paper. The first one takes advantage of circuit regularity, while the second limits the scope of the analysis. A set of circuits from the ISCAS85 benchmarks is used as case study. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, where substantial reductions of the required computation time are achieved.