软件错误检测与纠正技术可靠性研究

基于信息冗余的错误检测与纠正（Error Detection and Correction,EDAC）技术是常见的系统级抗单粒子翻转（Single Event Upsets,SEU）的容错方法,软件实现的EDAC技术是硬件EDAC技术的替代方案,通过软件编程,在现有存储段上增加具有纠错功能的编码（Error-correcting Codes,ECC）来实现存储区错误的检测和纠正。分析了软件EDAC方案中,纠错编码的纠错能力及编码效率、刷新间隔、需保护代码量等因素对可靠性的影响,分析和仿真实验结果表明,对于单个粒子引起的存储器随机错误,提高单个码字的纠错能力及编码效率、增大刷新间隔对可靠性的影响不大,而通过缩短任务执行的代码量来提高刷新间隔,以及压缩需保护代码的总量,对可靠性有较大改进。分析结论能够指导工程实践中,在实现资源、实时性、可靠性之间进行优化选择。      

A New Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Digital CMOS Circuits and Systems

This paper presents a new hybrid fault-tolerant architecture for robustness improvement of digital CMOS circuits and systems. It targets all kinds of errors in combinational part of logic circuits and thus, can be combined with advanced SEU protection techniques for sequential elements while reducing the power consumption. The proposed architecture combines different types of redundancies: information redundancy for error detection, temporal redundancy for soft error correction and hardware redundancy for hard error correction. Moreover, it uses a pseudo-dynamic comparator for SET and timing errors detection. Besides, the proposed method also aims to reduce power consumption of fault-tolerant architectures while keeping a comparable area overhead compared to existing solutions. Results on the largest ISCAS’85 and ITC’99 benchmark circuits show that our approach has an area cost of about 3 % to 6 % with a power consumption saving of about 33 % compared to TMR architectures.     

一种低开销的抗SEU锁存器

随着微电子技术的不断进步,集成电路工艺尺寸不断缩小,工作电压不断降低,节点的临界电荷越来越小,空间辐射引起的单粒子效应逐渐成为影响芯片可靠性的重要因素之一。针对辐射环境中高能粒子对锁存器的影响,提出了一种低开销的抗SEU锁存器(LOHL)。该结构基于C单元的双模冗余,实现对单粒子翻转的防护,从而降低软错误发生的概率。Spice模拟结果显示,与其他相关文献中加固锁存器相比,LOHL在电路面积、延迟和延迟-功耗积上有优势。     

Enhanced FPGA reliability through efficient run-time faultreconfiguration

The expanded use of field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) in remote, long life, and system-critical applications requires the development and implementation of effective, efficient FPGA fault-tolerance techniques. FPGA have inherent redundancy and in-the-field reconfiguration capabilities, thus providing alternatives to standard integrated circuit redundancy-based fault-recovery techniques. Runtime reliability can be enhanced by using such unique features. Recovery from permanent logic and interconnect faults without runtime computer-aided design (CAD) support can be efficiently performed with the use of fine-grained and physical design partitioning. Faults are localized to small partitioned blocks that have fixed interfaces to the surrounding portions of the design, and the affected blocks are reconfigured with previously generated, functionally equivalent block instances that do not use the faulty resources. This technique minimizes the post-fault-detection system downtime, while requiring little area overhead. Only the finely located faulty portions of the FPGA are removed from use. In addition, the end user need not have access to CAD tools, making the algorithm completely transparent to system users. This approach has been efficiently implemented on a diverse set of FPGA architectures. The algorithm's flexibility is also apparent from the variable emphases that can be placed on system reliability, area overhead, timing overhead, design effort, and system memory. Given user-defined emphases, the algorithm can be modified to specific application requirements. Experiments using random s-independent and s-correlated fault models reveal that the approach enhances system reliability, while minimizing area and timing overhead     

Hybrid time and hardware redundancy to mitigate SEU effects on SRAM-FPGAs: Case study over the MicroLAN protocol

SRAM-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are particularly sensitive to single event upsets caused by high-energy space radiation. Single Event Upset (In order to successfully deploy the SRAM-FPGA based designs in aerospace applications, designers need to adopt suitable hardening techniques. In this paper, we describe novel hybrid time and hardware redundancy (HT&HR) structures to mitigate SEU effects on FPGA, especially digital circuits that are designed with bidirectional ports. The proposed structures that combine time and hardware redundancy decrease the SEU propagation mechanisms among the redundant hard units. Analysis results and fault injection experiments on some standard ISCAS benchmarks and MicroLAN protocol, as a case study over the bidirectional ports, show that the capability of tolerating SEU effects in HT&HR technique increases up to 70 times with respect to solely hardware redundant versions. On average, the proposed method provides 39.2 times improvement against single upset faults and 14.9 times for double upset faults; however it imposes about 14.7% area overhead. Also, for the considered benchmarks, HT&HR circuits become 8.8% faster on the average than their TMR versions.     

ELIMINATING SPEED PENALTIES IN ECC PROTECTED MEMORY DESIGNS USING “BIT BYPASSING” TECHNIQUES

In deep sub-micron ICs,growing amounts of on-die memory and scaling effects make embedded memories more vulnerable to reliability problems,such as soft errors induced by radiation.Error Correction Code （ECC） along with scrubbing is an efficient method for protecting memories against these errors.However,the latency of coding circuits brings speed penalties in high performance applications.This paper proposed a ＂bit bypassing＂ ECC protected memory by buffering the encoded data and adding an identifying address for the input data.The proposed memory design has been fabricated on a 130 nm CMOS process.According to the measurement,the proposed scheme only gives the minimum delay overhead of 22.6％,compared with other corresponding memories.Furthermore,heavy ion testing demonstrated the single event effects performance of the proposed memory achieves error rate reductions by 42.9 to 63.3 times.     

Single event double node upset tolerance in MOS/spintronic sequential and combinational logic circuits

Spin-transfer torque random access memory (STT-RAM) is an emerging storage technology that is considered widely thanks to its attractive features such as low power consumption, nonvolatility, scalability and high density. STT-RAMs are comprised of a hybrid design of CMOS and spintronic units. Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) as the basic element of such hybrid technology is inherently robust against radiation induced faults. However, the peripheral CMOS component for sensing the resistance of the MTJs are prone to be affected by energetic particles. This paper proposes low power, nonvolatile and radiation hardened latch and lookup table circuits based on hybrid CMOS/MTJ technology for the next generation integrated circuit devices. Simulation results revealed that, the proposed circuits are fully robust against single event upsets (SEU) and also single event double node upsets (SEDU) that are of the main reliability challenging issues in current sub-nanometer CMOS technologies.     

An efficient management scheme for updating redundant information in flash-based storage system

Since flash memory has many attractive characteristics such as high performance, non-volatility, low power consumption and shock resistance, it has been widely used as a storage media in embedded and computer system environments. However, there are many shortcomings in flash memory such as potentially high I/O latency due to erase-before-write and poor durability due to limited erase cycles. To address these performance and reliability anomalies, many large-scale storage systems use redundancy-based parallel access schemes such as RAID techniques. However, such redundancy-based schemes incur high overhead due to generating and storing redundancy information, especially in flash-based storage systems. In this paper, we propose a novel and performance-effective approach using a redundancy-based data management scheme in flash storage, called Flash-aware Redundancy Array. The proposed technique not only reduces the redundancy management overhead by performing redundancy update operations during idle periods, but also provides a preventive mechanism to recover data from unexpected read errors occurring before such redundancy update operations finish. From the experiments, we found that the proposed technique improves flash-based storage systems by 19% in average execution time as compared to other redundancy-based approaches.     

一种基于编码的存储器加固设计

在太空辐射环境中存在各种宇宙射线和一些高能粒子,其中单粒子翻转（SEU）效应是引起存储器软错误的重要因素,降低了数据传输的可靠性,因此成为当前集成电路抗辐射加固设计的研究重点之一。标准的纠错编码（ECC）设计冗余度将占用超过50%的存储量,该设计基于缩短汉明码的原理实现了对32位存储器采用7位冗余码进行纠错编码的SEC-DED加固设计,在资源上得到了优化;同时从概率的角度分析了可靠性的理论基础,通过编码可靠性可以提高3到6个数量级。     

面向独热编码的有限状态机抗单粒子翻转设计

在空间高能粒子影响下,电路容易发生单粒子翻转,而在电路设计中处于核心地位的有限状态机一旦受到单粒子翻转影响,可能无法进行正常的状态转移,从而导致有限状态机失去数据控制功能。为此,面向独热编码的有限状态机进行了抗单粒子翻转设计,并以航空全双工交换以太网中的入队数据总线控制模块作为验证模型,通过故障注入验证了设计方法的正确性。最后对该设计进行了可靠性评估,结果表明相比于传统的三模冗余加固方法,该方法的失效概率降低了两个数量级,此外还能根据实际需求调整纠正位数。相比于编码方式,该方法采用的逻辑更简单,更便于设计人员的开发和使用,具有较强的实用性。     

Low cost and highly reliable radiation hardened latch design in 65 nm CMOS technology

As a consequence of technology scaling down, gate capacitances and stored charge in sensitive nodes are decreasing rapidly, which makes CMOS circuits more vulnerable to radiation induced soft errors. In this paper, a low cost and highly reliable radiation hardened latch is proposed using 65 nm CMOS commercial technology. The proposed latch can fully tolerate the single event upset (SEU) when particles strike on any one of its single node. Furthermore, it can efficiently mask the input single event transient (SET). A set of HSPICE post-layout simulations are done to evaluate the proposed latch circuit and previous latch circuits designed in the literatures, and the comparison results among the latches of type 4 show that the proposed latch reduces at least 39% power consumption and 67.6% power delay product. Moreover, the proposed latch has a second lowest area overhead and a comparable ability of the single event multiple upsets (SEMUs) tolerance among the latches of type 4. Finally, the impacts of process, supply voltage and temperature variations on our proposed latch and previous latches are investigated.     

一种新型的抗辐射加固锁存器

Due to aggressive technology scaling, radiation-induced soft errors have become a serious reliability concern in VLSI chip design. This paper presents a novel radiation hardened by design latch with high single-eventupset （SEU） immunity. The proposed latch can effectively mitigate SEU by internal dual interlocked scheme. The propagation delay, power dissipation and power delay product of the presented latch are evaluated by detailed SPICE simulations. Compared with previous SEU-hardening solutions such as TMR-Latch, the presented latch is more area efficient, delay and power efficient. Fault injection simulations also demonstrate the robustness of the presented latch even under high energy particle strikes.     

Reliability of Single-Error Correction Protected Memories

Reliability is a critical factor for systems operating in radiation environments. Among the different components in a system, memories are one of the parts most sensitive to soft errors due to their relatively large area. Due to their large cost, traditional techniques like Triple Modular Redundancy are not used to protect memories. A typical approach is to apply Error Correction Codes to correct single errors, and detect double errors. This type of codes, for example those based on Hamming, provides an initial level of protection. Detected single errors are usually corrected using scrubbing, by which the memory positions are periodically re-written after a fixed (deterministic scrubbing), or variable period (probabilistic scrubbing). These traditional models usually offer good results when calculating the reliability of memories (e.g. through the Mean Time To Failure). However, there are some particularities that are not modeled through these approaches, to the best of our knowledge. One of these particularities is how double errors are handled. In a traditional approach, two errors in the same word produce always a system failure (only single errors can be corrected). However, if the two (or more) errors affect the same bit, either the second one reinforces the first one (keeping just a single error), or corrects it. In both scenarios, the resulting situation does not trigger a system failure, which has a direct impact on the reliability of the memory. In this paper, traditional reliability models are refined to handle the mentioned scenarios, which produces a more precise analysis in the calculation of mean time to failure for memory systems.      

A novel radiation hardened by design latch

Due to aggressive technology scaling, radiation-induced soft errors have become a serious reliability concern in VLSI chip design. This paper presents a novel radiation hardened by design latch with high single-event-upset (SEU) immunity. The proposed latch can effectively mitigate SEU by internal dual interlocked scheme. The propagation delay, power dissipation and power delay product of the presented latch are evaluated by detailed SPICE simulations. Compared with previous SEU-hardening solutions such as TMR-Latch, the presented latch is more area efficient, delay and power efficient. Fault injection simulations also demonstrate the robustness of the presented latch even under high energy particle strikes.     

Radiation Hardened by Design Latches — A Review and SEU Fault Simulations

There are many Radiation Hardened by Design (RHBD) architectures presented in the literature to mitigate Single Event Upset (SEU) in a storage element, a latch. Nevertheless, the design of a SEU hardened latch is being continuously improved with respect to reliability, performance, power consumption and area overhead. SEU mitigating techniques by design focus on reducing criticality of sensitive nodes in a latch. Sensitive node(s) in a latch could be an active and/or a high impedance node(s). In this paper, we have classified previously presented SEU hardened by design latch architectures and reviewed SEU mechanisms in selected RHBD latch architectures on Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology models. Simulation studies using latest fault simulation model have been carried out. Simulation results have revealed some interesting observations described in this paper. Our findings, based on analyses, will provide valuable design inputs for futuristic RHBD latches with advanced technology nodes.     

New Lightweight Architectures for Secure FSM Design to Thwart Fault Injection and Trojan Attacks

Finite state machine (FSM) is a critical part in digital processing devices used in Internet of Things (IoT) applications as it controls complete functionality of the device. The synthesis tool implements deterministic FSM by adding extra don’t care states/transitions during optimization. This additional insertion makes the FSM vulnerable to setup-time violation based fault injection (STVFI) and hardware Trojan attacks. The existing techniques are inefficient to completely mitigate these vulnerabilities and exhibit significant design overhead. Therefore, this paper presents a novel lightweight secure machine design technique that completely mitigates the vulnerabilities with minimum overhead. The paper first proposes a new metric to identify all types of vulnerable transitions (VTs) followed by a trustworthy FSM design algorithm and efficient vulnerability mitigation architecture (EVMA). Though our EVMA completely alleviates the vulnerabilities to STVFI and Trojan attacks, it slightly increases the overhead due to additional multiplexers. Hence, we also propose new secure FSM design algorithm and two new lightweight vulnerability mitigation architectures (LVMA-I and LIVMA-II) that control the FFs using existing clear and/or preset pins instead of multiplexers. The experimental results on AES and RSA encryption modules show that the proposed technique detects 100% VTs. Further, ASIC and FPGA implementation of the proposed LIVMA-II using Cadence RTL and Xilinx Vivado presents on an average 40%, 59.6%, and 51.1% reduced area, power and delay respectively compared to the well-known technique. Due to negligible design overhead, our technique is best suitable for designing secure controller of portable IoT devices.     

基于FPGA的嵌入式加固系统设计

针对空间辐照环境,设计了一款基于FPGA平台抗辐照加固嵌入式系统。通过对存储单元进行三模冗余设计和(12,8)汉明码EDAC编码设计进行加固。对MC8051 IP核、I2C IP核、判决器,EDAC编码解码器等模块进行部分动态可重构设计。使用ICAP接口进行回读对比和动态可重构操作。系统配置后,定时对其进行回读对比。当检测到FPGA发生单粒子翻转时,采用部分重配置消除单粒子影响,使系统恢复正常。     

A new approach for Total Ionizing Dose effect analysis on Flash-based FPGA

With the high flexibility, increasing computing power and lower power consumption, FPGA devices have gained a lot interest in space and avionic applications. Among different types of FPGA devices, Flash-based FPGA is becoming increasingly attractive since their configuration memory is almost immune to Single Event Upset (SEU) induced by energetic particles. However, when applied in such applications, especially long term space missions, the FPGA devices are subject to cumulative ionizing damage, as known as Total Ionizing Dose (TID). The TID may affect the FPGA causing performance degradation and possible eventual permanent damage leading to functional failure. In this paper, we propose a new workflow for analyzing the TID effect on Flash-based FPGA considering the different distributions of TID over the chip and the different impact factors when the configurable logic is programmed to implement different logics in the design. The experimental results show the feasibility of such workflow to be used as assessment tool at early stage of design development.     

Efficient BISR Techniques for Embedded Memories Considering Cluster Faults

Instead of the traditional spare row/column redundancy architectures, block-based redundancy architectures are proposed in this paper. The redundant rows/columns are divided into row/column blocks. Therefore, the repair of faulty memory cells can be performed at the row/column-block level. Moreover, the redundant row/column blocks can be used to replace faulty cells anywhere in the memory array. This global characteristic is helpful for repairing cluster faults. The proposed redundancy architecture can be easily integrated with the embedded memory cores. Based on the proposed global redundancy architecture, a heuristic modified essential spare pivoting (MESP) algorithm suitable for built-in implementation is also proposed. According to experimental results, the area overhead for implementing the MESP algorithm is very low. Due to efficient usage of redundancy, the manufacturing yield, repair rate, and reliability can be improved significantly.      

Stateful-NOR based reconfigurable architecture for logic implementation

Most commercial Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have limitations in terms of density, speed, configuration overhead and power consumption mostly due to the use of SRAM cells in Look-Up Tables (LUTs), configuration memory and programmable interconnects. Also, hardwired Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) blocks designed for high performance arithmetic circuits in FPGA reduce the area available for reconfiguration. In this paper, we propose a novel generalized hybrid CMOS-memristor based architecture using stateful-NOR gates as basic building blocks for implementation of logic functions. These logic functions are implemented on memristor nanocrossbar layers, while the CMOS layer is used for selection and connection of memristors. The proposed pipelined architecture combines the features of ASIC, FPGA and microprocessor based designs. It has high density due to the use of nanocrossbar layer and high throughput especially for arithmetic circuits. The proposed architecture for three input one output logic block is compared with conventional LUT based Configurable Logic Block (CLB) having the same number of inputs and outputs; which shows 1.82×area saving, 1.57×speedup and 3.63×less power consumption. The automation algorithm to implement any logic function using proposed architecture is also presented.