Test circuit for measuring pulse widths of single-event transients causing soft errors

Author

Narasimham, B. ; Gadlage, Mattew J. ; Bhuva, Bharat L. ; Schrimpf, Ronald D. ; Massengill, Lloyd W. ; Holman, W. Timothy ; Witulski, Arthur F. ; Galloway, Kenneth F.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Eng. & Comput. Sci., Vanderbilt Univ., Nashville, TN

fYear

2008

fDate

24-27 March 2008

Firstpage

142

Lastpage

146

Abstract

A novel on-chip test circuit to measure single event transient (SET) pulse widths has been developed and implemented in IBM 130-nm and 90-nm processes for characterizing logic soft errors. Test measurements with energetic ions show transient widths ranging from 100 ps to over 1 ns, comparable to legitimate logic signals in such technologies. Design options to limit the SET pulse width and hence to mitigate soft errors were evaluated with the test circuit to demonstrate the effectiveness of such design techniques.

Keywords

integrated circuit testing; radiation effects; transients; energetic ions; logic soft errors; on-chip test circuit; pulse width measurement; single event transient pulse width; single-event transients; Circuit testing; Microelectronics; Pulse circuits; Pulse measurements; Space vector pulse width modulation; SER; SET; combinational logic; pulse width; single event; single event transient; soft error;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microelectronic Test Structures, 2008. ICMTS 2008. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Edinburgh

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-1800-8

Electronic_ISBN

978-1-4244-1801-5

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICMTS.2008.4509329

Filename

4509329