IEICE Trans - SET Pulse-Width Measurement Suppressing Pulse-Width Modulation and Within-Die Process Variation Effects

SET Pulse-Width Measurement Suppressing Pulse-Width Modulation and Within-Die Process Variation Effects

Ryo HARADA  Yukio MITSUYAMA  Masanori HASHIMOTO  Takao ONOYE

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E97-A    No.7    pp.1461-1467
Publication Date: 2014/07/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E97.A.1461
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on Design Methodologies for System on a Chip)
Category:
Keyword:
soft error,  single event transient (SET),  pulse-width,  pulse-width modulation,  measurement circuit,  within-die process variation,

Full Text: PDF(1.8MB)>>

Summary:
This paper presents a measurement circuit structure for capturing SET pulse-width suppressing pulse-width modulation and within-die process variation effects. For mitigating pulse-width modulation while maintaining area efficiency, the proposed circuit uses massively parallelized short inverter chains as a target circuit. Moreover, for each inverter chain on each die, pulse-width calibration is performed. In measurements, narrow SET pulses ranging 5ps to 215ps were obtained. We confirm that an overestimation of pulse-width may happen when ignoring die-to-die and within-die variation of the measurement circuit. Our evaluation results thus point out that calibration for within-die variation in addition to die-to-die variation of the measurement circuit is indispensable.