Enabling error resilience throughout the embedded system

Hans Spanjaart, Altera Corporation
EETimes (7/10/2012 5:40 PM EDT)

Decreasing semiconductor device geometries allow ever higher levels of integration in System-on-Chip (SoC) devices. In the domain of FPGAs, this results in very high capacity programmable hardware devices. At 28-nm, the latest trend in FPGAs is to combine FPGA fabric with a high-performance SoC. Dubbed an “SoC FPGA”, these devices contain a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, level 2 cache, a rich set of peripherals, up to four memory controllers, high-speed transceivers, and a low-power, low-cost 28-nm FPGA fabric. Such a concentration of computational performance drives embedded systems to carrying abundance in memory capacity. Several gigabytes of DDR is no exception, and with that more attention must be paid to the probability and avoidance of soft errors.

What are soft errors?
Commonly used memory bit cells retain their programmed value in the form of an electrical charge. Writing a memory bit cell consists of reprogramming and forcing the electrical charge to represent the new desired value. Memory bit cells will retain their value indefinitely, as long as basic requirements are met, e.g. power is applied, and – for dynamic memory types – a refresh method is active.

The stored charge can be negatively impacted by injection of a charge foreign to the memory device. Cosmic energy may affect a memory bit cell, as the earth atmosphere is a significant, but not flawless barrier. Alpha particles are emitted by decay of materials, and while the chip packaging is engineered for very low emission rates, the problem can’t be totally ignored.

The event in which an external energy injection inadvertently modifies the value of a memory bit cell is referred to as a single event upset (SEU). The class of these errors is soft errors, as the error is not caused by a defect in the device, but instead by the device being subject to an outside disturbance. If the correct data is subsequently rewritten, it is not likely to undergo the same upset. As such, the likelihood of such an event is extremely small, while it increases with growing memory capacity.

The acceptability of an SEU rate depends on the application domain. Developers of applications used at high altitudes will be concerned with higher soft error rates (SER) due to cosmic rays. Military, automotive, high-performance computing, communication, and industrial customers will be concerned with degradation of safety, security and reliability.

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