Soft Error
Soft-error resilience of the IBM POWER6 processor input/output subsystem
March, 2008 - EETimes
EETImes Headline News: Microsoft says PCs may need DRAM upgrade Latest Report on Soft Errors in DRAM
May 17, 2007 - EETimes
Soft error threat on prime time news on French Main TV Channel (in French)
January 7, 2007 - TF1
Les Alpes, banc d'essai pour les puces (in French)
December 13, 2006 - Les Echos
Un laboratoire du CNRS installé à 2.500 mètres d´altitude dans les Alpes teste la résistance des circuits intégrés aux rayons cosmiques.
Electronique : Alerte aux rayons cosmiques
September, 2006 - Science & Vie by Olivier James
Cosmic rays damage automotive electronics
May 31, 2006 - EETimes by Martin Mason
Soft errors´ impact on system reliability
September 30, 2004 - EETimes by Ritesh Mastipuram and Edwin C Wee
Soft errors in memory devices are becoming increasingly important considerations in system design.
iRoC in the News
iRoC aquires neutron database
June 10, 2005 - DAM-CEA by Olivier Bersillon
iRoC aquires neutron database from Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique (CEA) for a better understanding of the Soft Error process. See CEA Technologies.
Cosmic radiation comes to ASIC and SOC design
May 12, 2005 - EDN by Michael Santarini, Senior Editor
SEEs (single-event effects), such as soft errors, have since the early 1980s appeared in commercial electronics, but they are now becoming the dominant reliability-failure mechanism in modern CMOS technologies. These types of errors forced Sun to recall workstations in the late '90s and, EDN has learned, also caused failures in memories and ASICs controlling a Cisco router . Experts say that these effects will soon become more commonplace in logic as processes head into 65- and 45-nm nodes.............. Read article.
Hot Design Houses
February 21, 2005 - EETimes
Design Out Soft-Error Susceptibility
February 3, 2005 - Electronic Design by David Maliniak
Soft errors--which are induced by cosmic rays, alpha particles, and thermal neutrons--increasingly dominate IC reliability at nanometer geometries. Yet a new design platform from iRoC Technologies gives designers a way to accurately project the risks of soft errors in their designs.............. Read article.
When bad things happen to good chips
January 28, 2005 - EDA Confidential by by Peggy Aycinena
The iRoC message is that with the introduction of nanometer technologies, "new types of faults are appearing and existing EDA tools are reaching limits in their capacity to predict the physical behavior of new semiconductor technologies." – and all of this is making chips more and more vulnerable to "internal defect and external aggressions. Read article.
Kit Helps Chip Developers to Avoid ‘Soft Error’ Blues
January 24, 2005 - EETimes, by Richard Goering
Santa Cruz, Calif. - Radiation-induced "soft errors" are becoming a hard problem for chip designers at 90 nanometers and below. Soft-error testing firm Iroc Technologies Corp. this week will roll out what it calls the first commercial tool to analyze a design for sensitivity to soft errors. Soft errors-transient faults caused by neutrons or alpha particles-have long plagued memory designers and, as feature sizes decrease, are now starting to affect logic designers as well.............. Read article.
iRoC Technologies Introduces Soft Error Design Solution Platform
January 24, 2005 - SoC Central
iRoC Technologies has introduced its Soft Error Design Solution Platform to help IC designers meet reliability targets. The first product in the Platform -- the SoCFIT software solution -- analyzes the soft error risk of a system-on-chip (SoC) at full chip and block level, giving designers insight into which blocks may be the major contributors to the over all soft error rate (SER), and enabling them to perform trade-off analyses between various design elements to meet their targets. SoCFIT helps reduce risk for designers by providing the soft error failure-in-time (FIT) range during the design phase instead of in a post-production qualification test -- where the cost of failures can be prohibitive. Soft errors are transient faults caused by external radiation -- mainly cosmic rays -- that affect the logic states of ICs and memories.............. Read article.
SRAM-based FPGAs 'vulnerable to neutron corruption'
April 28, 2004 - Electronic News
Programmable chip maker Actel (distributed by Soanar) has released the results of a “comprehensive third-party investigation” into the effects of high-energy neutrons generated by cosmic rays striking the Earth’s atmosphere*. According to the company, the report verifies that field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) based on Flash and antifuse technologies are immune to configuration upsets caused by the neutrons............. Read article.
INDUSTRY REPORT SHEDS LIGHT ON FPGA RELIABILITY
April 19, 2004 - Actel Corp.
iRoC Technologies Study Demonstrates that Neutrons Cause Ground-Level Failures in SRAM FPGAs, While Antifuse- and Flash-Based FPGAs are Immune to Soft Errors.
Neutron storm swirls around FPGA reliability
April 19, 2004 - EE Times, by Ron Wilson
SAN MATEO, Calif. — If you were lying on the beach in Zanzibar, just south of the equator, it wouldn't be a problem. In a plane cruising at 35,000 feet over the magnetic North or South Pole, it would be a big one. Indeed, even in, say, Denver, at 5,000 feet above sea level, neutron radiation can cause glitches in electronic circuits — specifically, SRAMs............. Read article.
ST tames soft errors in SRAM by adding capacitors
13 January 2004 - EE Times, by Ron Wilson
SAN MATEO, Calif. — Among the trolls lurking under the bridge to sub-100-nanometer devices, one of the least talked about is alpha-particle-induced soft errors. But like signal integrity, power and feature formation, this one could be a showstopper............. Read article.
The Fault-Tolerant Architect engineer is born
October 04, 2002 - Electronic Engineering Times
Cosmic rays threaten the quality of advanced chips with single event upsets (SEUs), especially in memory at 0.13 micron and logic at 0.09 micron.Read article.
iRoC Develops Soft Error Rate IC Test Method
September 09, 2002 - Electronicnews
The Test Floor Compiled by Jeff Chappell
Soft-error simulator supports ModelSim
July 2002 - Electronic Products
For more information about this article: http://www.electronicproducts.com
Eliminating Gremlins And Glitches
May/June 2002 - Netronics
Engineers who are used to finding a logical explanation for everything are skeptical about soft errors in their designs. NETRONICS @ WORK When designs fail, there must be an explainable ............. Read article.
Equipment refines soft-error detection in chips
May 24, 2002 - Electronic Engineering Times by David Lammers
The detection of soft errors in silicon chips is attracting attention on several fronts, as the struggle intensifies to prevent glitches caused by the naturally occurring bombardment of alpha particles from packaging materials, and neutrons from cosmic rays. Read article.
Designing to Combat Transient and Soft Errors
May 13, 2002 - Electronic News
Signal integrity is commonly accepted as one the major challenges for very deep-submicron (VDSM) design. This challenge is likely to be the design matrioshka*: After the well-established capacitance effect, design engineers are now facing the inductance effect. Read article.
Mosys, iRoC target IC error protection
February 06, 2002 - Electronic Engineering Times by Anthony Cataldo
IC reliability is coming into sharper focus as two vendors of intellectual property (IP) are drawing attention to the phenomena that causes random and intermittent errors in memory and logic circuits. Read article.
Momentum builds for open-source processors
February 01, 2001 - Electronic Engineering Times by Peter Clarke
Momentum is slowly building for freely available open-source processors, the semiconductor equivalent of open-source software movements like Linux. Read article.