The Soft Error Challenge

With the introduction of new Nanometer technologies, as semiconductor processes move towards nanometer geometries, chips are becoming increasingly vulnerable to internal defects and external aggressions. New types of faults are appearing and existing analysis tools are reaching their limits in their capacity to predict the physical behavior of new semiconductor technologies.

Faults include permanent errors – internal defects not detected during the design phase that must be corrected at production – and transient faults – temporary errors caused by external aggressions such as signal integrity issues or natural radiation creating soft errors.

Permanent errors

Permanent errors within chips are becoming more and more difficult to pinpoint as device dimensions are continuously shrinking. New types of permanent faults are introduced with each new semiconductor technology and DFT test designers have to develop new techniques for providing a means to detect and correct those faults before the chip is shipped to the customer. New types of faults introduced by nanometer technologies are typically: imbalance and sense amplifier faults, pattern sensitive faults and complex functional faults - three or higher order coupling faults.

Transient errors

Transient errors are even more difficult to detect as they are unpredictable and occurr erratically during the life of the chip. Transient errors encompass signal integrity issues - timing faults due to crosstalk or ground bounce - and external disruptions - soft errors created by the impact of particles such as neutrons or alpha particles. By nature, these transient errors cannot be predicted during the design phase and therefore require self-correcting intelligence to be harmless to the application.

You will find in this section many resources about soft errors:

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