Fast-yet-accurate Variation-Aware Current and Voltage Modelling of Radiation-Induced Transient Fault

Abstract

For robust systems, it is important to mitigate radiation effect in early stages to reduce the design cost. Traditionally, a double-exponential current source is widely used to model the transient fault for analyzing the radiation effects. However, in light of complicating effects in the advanced technologies, such approach is no longer sufficient to estimate transient faults and may lead to inaccurate results. Therefore, we propose a fast-yet-accurate approach to model the radiation-induced transient fault, meanwhile considering the interaction between its transient current and transient voltage. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve 105 X speedup with an average accuracy loss of only 2.6% compared to the 3D mixed-mode TCAD simulation. Moreover, variation sources also become big issues with the progressing technology nodes and thus the proposed method is then extended to incorporate these variations during transient-fault analysis. As a result, sensitivity analysis that covers voltage, gate-length and device-width variations can be performed fast and accurately in our method.