Evidence of a dynamic fault model in the DICE radiation-hardened cell

• William Souza da Cruz École des Mines de Saint- Étienne
• Jean-Max Dutertre École des Mines de Saint- Étienne
• Jean-Baptiste Rigaud École des Mines de Saint- Étienne
• Guillaume Hubert University of Toulouse

Resumo

Hardware redundancy techniques are routinely used for mitigation purposes in radiation-hardened integrated circuits. Duplication indeed has been proved effective to harden the well known dice memory cell against seus. In this work, we nonetheless report, on simulation basis, the possibility of a dynamic fault mechanism that may turn an set into an error. We also introduce and validate a countermeasure that alleviates this weakness.

Palavras-chave: Computer architecture, Microprocessors, Transient analysis, Circuit faults, Integrated circuit modeling, Transistors, Random access memory, Radiation hardening, DICE memory cell, dynamic fault model, SEE