Postgraduate Conference 2011 Schedule

Soft error could cause digital circuit to temporary malfunction. In an asynchronous circuit, the temporary malfunction of the control circuit will cause deadlock; a state where the system will be disabled indefinitely until the system has been reset or the error is filtered or corrected from the system. C-element is most commonly found in control circuit. We have studied the vulnerability of six different c-elements towards soft error by injecting current pulse into different locations. We developed method for assessing vulnerability of circuits towards soft error and from the analysis, we could prove that dual rail c-element is more resistant toward soft error compared with single rail celement. Modified Bisection Search for Faster Metastability Characterization Mr Ghaith Tarawneh MSD, Stage 2 Prof Alex Yakovlev, Dr Gordon Russell Circuit state bisection is a robust technique to characterize the performance of multi-stage synchronizers. The passage of metastability between synchronizer stages introduces effects that are not captured by small-signal models and thus numerical integration remains the most reliable method for characterizing this behavior. However, the large number of transient simulations required to characterize one circuit through bisection makes it very difficult to use this technique to run variability analysis or parametric optimization on synchronizer circuits. We present a modified bisection search algorithm that performs 2.5 to 3.2 times faster than conventional bisection without any loss of accuracy. Our method is not restricted to any latch topology or behavior and can safely replace conventional bisection for characterizing any synchronizer circuit.