3 Review(s)

The complexity of communications and signal processing circuits increases every year. This is made possible by the CMOS technology scaling that enables the integration of more and more transistors on a single device. This increased complexity makes the circuits more vulnerable to errors. At the same time, the scaling means that transistors operate with lower voltages and are more susceptible to errors caused by noise and manufacturing variations. The importance of radiation-induced soft errors also increases as technology scales. Soft errors can change the logical value of a circuit node creating a temporary error that can affect the system operation. To ensure that soft errors do not affect the operation of a given circuit, a wide variety of techniques can be used. These include the use of special manufacturing processes for the integrated circuits like, for example, the silicon on insulator. Another option is to design basic circuit blocks or complete design libraries to minimize the probability of soft errors. Finally, it is also possible to add redundancy at the system level to detect and correct errors one classical example is the use of triple modular redundancy (TMR) that triples a block and votes among the three outputs to detect and correct errors. The main issue with those soft errors mitigation techniques is that they require a large overhead in terms of circuit implementation.