Measuring Architectural Vulnerability Factors

The continuous exponential growth in transistors per chip as described by Moore’s law has spurred tremendous progress in the functionality and performance of semiconductor devices, particularly microprocessors. At the same time, each succeeding technology generation has introduced new obstacles to maintaining this growth rate. Transient faults caused by single-event upsets have emerged as a key challenge likely to gain significantly more importance in the next few design generations. Techniques for dealing with these faults exist, but they come at a cost. Designers need accurate soft-error estimates early in the design cycle to weigh the benefits of error protection techniques against their costs. This article presents a method for generating these estimates.