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Transient pulses generated by high-energy particles can cause soft errors in circuits, resulting in spacecraft malfunctions and posing serious threats to the normal operation of spacecraft. For integrated circuits used in space applications, it is necessary to first evaluate soft errors caused by transient pulses. Conventional soft-error-rate evaluation tools are designed to simulate the generation of transient pulses using many accurate models, while the propagation of transient pulses is primarily simulated by circuit-level simulation tools. Due to the limitations of simulation tools, conventional evaluation approaches are limited to the circuit scale. The simulation runtime is unbearable for large-scale integrated circuits. This paper presents an approach for evaluating the soft error rate using machine learning. A back propagation neural network is implemented in the proposed approach. It helps to determine the probability of transient pulse propagation. Compared with the conventional soft-error-rate evaluation results, the proposed approach demonstrates a strong correlation in both trend and magnitude. The average difference between the results obtained using the proposed evaluation method and the experimental results is 23.5%, which is 7.5% higher than that between the results obtained using the conventional evaluation method and the experimental results. Compared to the conventional evaluation method, the proposed approach improves the runtime by an order of magnitude. The proposed approach also benefits the locating of highly sensitive circuit nodes in large-scale integrated circuits. Circuit design and radiation hardening are both useful applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IR-drop is a fundamental constraint by almost all integrated circuits (ICs) physical designs, and many iterations of timing engineer change order (ECO), IR-drop ECO, or other ECO are needed before design signoff. However, IR-drop analysis usually takes a long time and wastes so many resources. In this work, we develop a fast dynamic IR-drop predictor based on a machine learning technique, XGBoost, and the prediction method can be applied to vector-based and vectorless IR-drop analysis simultaneously. Correlation coefficient is often used to characterize the symmetry of prediction data and golden data, and our experiments show that the prediction correlation coefficient is more than 0.96 and the average error is no more than 1.3 mV for two industry designs, which are of 2.4 million and 3.7 million instances, respectively, and that the analysis is speeded up over 4.3 times compared with the IR-drop analysis by commercial tool, Redhawk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reliability of integrated circuits under advanced process nodes is facing more severe challenges. Single-event transients (SET) are an important cause of soft errors in space applications. The SET caused by heavy ions in the 28 nm bulk silicon inverter chains was studied. A test chip with good symmetry layout design was fabricated based on the 28 nm process, and the chip was struck by using 5 kinds of heavy ions with different linear energy transfer (LET) values on heavy-ion accelerator. The research results show that in advanced technology, smaller sensitive volume makes SET cross-section measured at 28 nm smaller than 65 nm by an order of magnitude, the lower critical charge required to generate SET will increase the reliability threat of low-energy ions to the circuit, and high-energy ions are more likely to cause single-event multiple transient (SEMT), which cannot be ignored in practical circuits. The transients pulse width data can be used as a reference for SET modeling in complex circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]