Large digital integrated circuits designed to solve space applications, have to be designed following standards that recommend to include hardening techniques against Single Event Phenomena caused by harsh radiation environments. It is specifically important in the case of modern deep-submicron technologies. Single Event Effects are phenomena related to the effects of radiation when ionizing particles hit the surface of semiconductors in certain critical areas, where the consequences are mainly data corruption or unexpected behavior with no permanent damage. Fault injection studies are a valuable methodology to evaluate the robustness of the circuit mainly in the early stages of the design. This paper introduces the second generation of the emulation-based fault injection platform FT-UNSHADES supported by the European Space Agency, where new features have been included to fulfill with the demands of a growing community of users.
Simulation of pulsed laser single event effects (SEE) is not considered in most of the well known software packages for mixed-mode simulation of SEE. This paper shows an adaptation of the Sentaurus TCAD suite to pulsed laser SEE simulation. After the literature review, we present the virtual model of the target transistor, calibrated against a real transistor of an specific ASIC. That virtual model is used to evaluate the Linear Energy Transfer (LET) threshold for bitflip in a simulated flip-flop circuit using the heavy-ion simulation tools of TCAD. That simulations help us to make an adaptation of Sentaurus TCAD for simulation of pulsed laser experiments. The pulsed laser simulation results are compared with a laser pulse experiment, showing that the proposed model achieves more accuracy than previous models referred to in the literature.
SUMMARYPulsed laser illumination constitutes an excellent tool to emulate the effects produced by the impact of highly energetic particles on electronic circuits. Numerical simulation techniques could be used to study these effects and to establish accurate relationships between the laser parameters and the particle characteristics. Unfortunately, although particle incidence can be accurately simulated, up to now, there not exist a simulation technique able to reproduce completely the effects in electronics produced by a femtosecond pulsed laser. In this paper, we explore the Synopsys Sentaurus TCAD ability to simulate the effects of pulsed laser illumination. Theoretical study of the physics of the laser-semiconductor interactions leads us to design a new simulation tool. Modifying the heavy ion generation rate included in Sentaurus TCAD, we can take into account all the theoretical predicted characteristics of femtosecond laser illumination, and reproduce the single event effects (SEE) found in experimental tests.
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