Due to continuous CMOS technology downscaling, Integrated Circuits (ICs) have become more susceptible to radiation-induced hazards such as soft errors. Thus, to design radiation-hardened and reliable ICs, the Soft Error Rate (SER) estimation constitutes an essential procedure. An accurate SER evaluation is provided based on a SPICE-oriented electrical masking analysis, combined with a TCAD characterization process. Furthermore, the proposed work analyzes the effect of a Static Timing Analysis (STA) methodology and the actual interconnection delay on SER evaluation. An analysis of the generated Single Event Multiple Transients (SEMTs) and the circuit operating frequency that are related to the SER estimation is also discussed. Various benchmarks, synthesized utilizing a 45 nm and 15 nm technology, are employed, and the experimental results demonstrate the SER variation as the device node scales down.

Integrated circuit susceptibility to radiation-induced faults remains a major reliability concern. The continuous downscaling of device feature size and the reduction in supply voltage in CMOS technology tend to worsen the problem. Thus, the evaluation of Soft Error Rate (SER) in the presence of multiple transient faults is necessary, since it remains an open research field. In this work, a Monte-Carlo simulation-based methodology is presented taking into consideration the masking mechanisms and placement information. The proposed SER estimation tool exploits the results of a Single Event Transient (SET) pulse characterization process with HSPICE to obtain an accurate assessment of circuit vulnerability to radiation. A new metric, called Glitch Latching Probability, which represents the impact of the masking effects on a SET, is introduced to identify gate sensitivity and, finally, experimental results on a set of ISCAS’ 89 benchmarks are presented.

Radiation-induced soft errors in Integrated Circuits (ICs) have always been a matter of great reliability concern. However, the ongoing shrinking of CMOS technology nodes, which results in high frequency, low power, and small area exacerbates the problem. Thus, accurate evaluation of the ICs’ vulnerability to such errors has become crucial, especially when a radiation-hardening process is developed. In this article, we present a gatelevel Soft Error Rate (SER) estimation framework based on an event-driven approach that models the generated Single Event Transients (SETs) as event pairs that propagate through the circuit. Dynamic Timing Analysis (DTA) is performed to estimate SET arrival times at Flip-Flop (FF) inputs and detect a soft error. Moreover, our approach approximates the glitch height and considers the noise immunity thresholds of gates to evaluate potential SET electrical masking. Additionally, our event-driven framework enables accurate propagation of Single Event Multiple Transients (SEMTs), which have become commonplace in combinational circuits. Experimental evaluation on ISCAS ’89 benchmarks indicates that the proposed event-driven height-aware approach exhibits 21.06% more accurate SER estimation on average, compared to conventional graph-based techniques, with respect to SPICE simulation. F1 scores further strengthen the previous result, demonstrating an average improvement of 11.86%. In terms of failures in time, experimental results show that the graph-based approach overestimates SER by an average of 8558 and up to 16485 errors compared to the proposed method. Finally, our approach is used to effectively identify the most sensitive gates that could potentially be hardened in a SER mitigation scenario.

Soft errors and Hardware Trojans (HTs) constitute major reliability concerns, and in combination they can pose an even greater threat to circuit security. The main aim of this research is to develop and implement a reliability-based HT and to identify the optimal regions for its injection, enabling the creation of challenging benchmarks for evaluating detection techniques. In this context, a reliability-based HT is designed and evaluated using different components to achieve the required time overhead. Next, a method that combines the generation and propagation of Single-Event Transients (SETs), while accounting for both masking effects and the design’s timing constraints, is employed to efficiently identify the most vulnerable and critical gates. The sensitive gates selected for HT insertion exhibit 50–70% vulnerability to soft errors. At the same time, their insertion and the resulting path delay overhead must not violate the design’s timing constraints, and the additional area must remain below 10% of the total area. These three conditions ensure that the inserted HTs remain stealthy and, therefore, challenging to detect. The experimental results demonstrate that selecting this category of gates is highly effective, as it leads to a significant increase in the number of soft errors and, consequently, aggravates circuit vulnerability with minimal impact on the design. On average, the targeted gates exhibit a 130% increase in sensitivity, and the overall Soft Error Rate (SER) increases by 78%, confirming the importance of providing robust benchmarks to combat potential attacks of this kind.