Layout-based Vulnerability Analysis of LEON3 Processor to Single Event Multiple Transients using Satisfiability Modulo Theories

Sowmith Nethula, Vivek Bansal, Ghaith Hamad, Otmane Ait Mohamed
Concordia University


Abstract

With the reduction in transistor size, the radiation-induced soft error phenomenon in electronic circuits has become a significant reliability concern. In newer technologies, a high energy particle strike can affect multiple cells resulting in Single Event Multiple Transients (SEMTs). For an event affecting n cells horizontally, the SEMT pattern will be aliased as SEMTn. In this paper, we present a framework to estimate the SEMT vulnerability of the LEON3 processor by using Satisfiability Modulo Theories. This framework considers layout-based cell adjacency as error sites and includes the Electrical, Logical masking factors while estimating the vulnerability. The results indicate an overall average SEMT fault propagation probabilities of 30\% and 54\% due to the effects of SEMT3 and SEMT4, respectively. The total time to analyze the fault effects following our methodology is approximate 8.5 hours for the LEON3 ASIC Core on a server with 160 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) 10-core E7-8870 CPU running at 2.40GHz and with 1 TB of Main Memory.