A versatile architecture for long-term monitoring of single-event transient durations

Abstract

We present design and analysis of an on-chip measurement infrastructure, which facilitates long-term monitoring of single-event transient durations in digital VLSI circuits exposed to uncontrollable radiation. Unlike the known oscilloscope-based methods, our approach is all-digital: SET durations are measured by the SET-gated counting of pulses generated by a high-frequency ring oscillator, and stored in an up/down-counter array organized in a ring. We carefully elaborate a comprehensive concept for making our infrastructure SEU tolerant, with the main challenge being to attain a sufficiently high probability of recording useful hits in the target before exhausting the SEU tolerance of the infrastructure. Our key contribution here concerns the protection of the counter array: Rather than resorting to radiation hardening or explicit triple modular redundancy (TMR), we save area by using a novel redundant duplex counter architecture: For a small number of recorded SETs, our architecture implicitly implements TMR, albeit in a way that degrades gracefully for larger numbers of recorded SETs. Besides standard functional and timing verification, we use Spice-based SET injection for verifying the effectiveness of our SEU-tolerant architecture, and some cross section-based probabilistic analysis for confirming that our measurement infrastructure based on it indeed achieves its purpose.