Single Event Transients Generation and Propagation Flow using Commercial EDA Tools

Abstract

The ever increasing demand for reliable microelectronic systems in the presence of radiation, combined with the continuous shrinking of CMOS technologies, has rendered the impact of radiation-induced voltage glitches, known as Single Event Transients (SETs), more and more critical. In order to mitigate such errors, the analysis of circuit radiation immunity to these effects is mandatory. This analysis is, nowadays, performed either with manufacturing and irradiation experiments, which is prohibitively expensive or with TCAD and SPICE simulations, which are computationally expensive, thus they can be applied only to relatively small circuits. In this work, we present a methodology of SET generation and propagation, using SPICE and Static Timing Analysis flows, respectively. Our method is orders of magnitude faster than simulation and yields 1.6% error, on average. © 2021 IEEE.