• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2016.10a
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• pp.655-658
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• 2016

Xilinx 7-Series FPGA(Field Programmable Gate Array)s mainly used for the implementation of high-performance digital circuit have SRAM-type configuration memory and can malfunction when soft errors occur in their configuration memory. SEM(Soft Error Mitigation Controller) offered by Xilinx helps users mitigate the influence of soft errors in configuration memory. When soft errors occur, SEM Controller can recover the state of FPGA through partial reconfiguration if the soft errors are correctable by ECC(Error Correction Code) and CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Code). This paper presents the availability analysis of Xilinx 7-Series FPGAs against soft errors under the protection of the SEM Controller. Availability functions are derived and compared according to the correction capability of the SEM Controller. The result may help to estimate the reliability of SRAM-based FPGA running in an environment where soft errors may occur.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.38 no.2
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• pp.87-94
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• 2001

A soft error rate for DRAM was predicted in connection with the leakage current in cell capacitor. The charge in cell capacitor was decreased during the DRAM operation, and soft error retes due to the leakage current were calculated in various operation mode of DRAM. It was found that the soft error rate of the /bit mode was dominant with small leakage current, but as increasing the leakage current memory mode shown the dominant effect on soft error rate. Using the 256M grade DRAM structure it was predicted that the soft error rate was influenced by the change of the cell capacitance, bit line capacitance, and the input voltage sensitivity of sense amplifier, and these results can be used to the design of the optimum cells in the next generation DRAM development.

• The Transactions of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers
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• v.57 no.1
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• pp.128-136
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• 2008

In this paper, we propose a new cache structure for effective error correction of soft error. We added check bit and SEEB(soft error evaluation block) to evaluate the status of cache line. The SEEB stores result of parity check into the two-bit shit register and set the check bit to '1' when parity check fails twice in the same cache line. In this case the line where parity check fails twice is treated as a vulnerable to soft error. When the data is filled into the cache, the new replacement algorithm is suggested that it can only use the valid block determined by SEEB. This structure prohibits the vulnerable line from being used and contributes to efficient use of cache by the reuse of line where parity check fails only once can be reused. We tried to minimize the side effect of the proposed cache and the experimental results, using SPEC2000 benchmark, showed 3% degradation in hit rate, 15% timing overhead because of parity logic and 2.7% area overhead. But it can be considered as trivial for SEEB because almost tolerant design inevitably adopt this parity method even if there are some overhead. And if only parity logic is used then it can have $5%{\sim}10%$ advantage than ECC logic. By using this proposed cache, the system will be protected from the threat of soft error in cache and the hit rate can be maintained to the level without soft error in the cache.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.435-446
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• 2011

Microprocessors are becoming increasingly vulnerable to soft errors due to the current trends of semiconductor technology scaling. Traditional redundant multi-threading architectures provide perfect fault tolerance by re-executing all the computations. However, such a full re-execution technique significantly increases the verification workload on the processor resources, resulting in severe performance degradation. This paper presents a pro-active verification management approach to mitigate the verification workload to increase its performance with a minimal effect on overall reliability. An anomaly-speculation-based filter checker is proposed to guide a verification priority before the re-execution process starts. This technique is accomplished by exploiting a value similarity property, which is defined by a frequent occurrence of partially identical values. Based on the biased distribution of similarity distance measure, this paper investigates further application to exploit similar values for soft error tolerance with anomaly speculation. Extensive measurements prove that the majority of instructions produce values, which are different from the previous result value, only in a few bits. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme accelerates the processor to be 180% faster than traditional fully-fault-tolerant processor with a minimal impact on overall soft error rate.

• Journal of Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems
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• v.17 no.11
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• pp.1101-1105
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• 2011

Radiation particles can introduce temporary errors in memory systems. To protect against these errors, so-called soft errors, error detection and correcting codes are used. In addition, scrubbing is applied which is a fundamental technique to avoid the accumulation of soft errors. This paper introduces an optimal scrubbing scheme, which is suitable for a system with auto error detection and correction logic. An auto error detection and correction logic can correct soft errors without CPU's writing operation. The proposed scrubbing scheme leads to maximum reliability by considering both allowable scrubbing load and the periodic accesses to memory by the tasks running in the system.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.26 no.10
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• pp.1559-1562
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• 2022

As electronic devices technology scales down into the deep-submicron to achieve high-density, low power and high performance integrated circuits, multiple bit upsets by soft errors have become a major threat to on-chip memory systems. To address the soft error problem, single error correction, double error detection and double adjacent error correction (SEC-DED-DAEC) codes have been recently proposed. But these codes do not troubleshoot mis-correction problem. We propose the SEC-DED_DAEC code with without mis-correction. The decoder for proposed code is implemented as hardware and verified. The results show that there is no mis-correction in the proposed codes and the decoder can be employed on-chip memory system.

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.168-176
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• 2015

Due to the reduction in device feature size, transient faults (soft errors) in logic circuits induced by radiations increase dramatically. Many researches have been done in modeling and analyzing the susceptibility of sequential circuit elements caused by soft errors. However, to the best knowledge of the authors, there is no work which has well considerated the feedback characteristics and the multiple clock cycles of sequential circuits. In this paper, we present a new method for evaluating the susceptibility of sequential circuit elements to soft errors. The proposed method uses four Error Propagation Probability Matrixs (EPPMs) to represent the error propagation probability of logic gates and flip-flops in current clock cycle. Based on the predefined matrix union operations, the susceptibility of circuit elements in multiple clock cycles can be evaluated. Experimental results on ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits show that our method is more accurate and efficient than previous methods.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.601-606
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• 2017

SRAM-based FPGAs mainly used to develop and implement high-performance circuits have SRAM-type configuration memory. Soft errors in memory devices are the main threat from a reliability point of view. Soft errors occurring in the configuration memory of FPGAs cause FPGAs to malfunction. SEM(Soft Error Mitigation) Controllers offered by Xilinx can mitigate the influence of soft errors in configuration memory. SEM Controllers use ECC(Error Correction Code) and CRC(Cyclic Redundancy Code) which are placed around the configuration memory to detect and correct the errors. The correction is done through a partial reconfiguration process. This paper presents the availability analysis of SRAM-based FPGAs against soft errors under the protection of SEM Controllers. Availability functions were derived and compared according to the correction capability of SEM Controllers of several different families of FPGAs. The result may help select an SRAM-based FPGA part and estimate the availability of FPGAs running in an environment where soft errors occur.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics D
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• v.36D no.2
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• pp.55-61
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• 1999

A soft error rate (SER) simulator for DRAM was developed. In comparison to the other SER simulator using device simulator or Monte Carlo simulator, the proposed simulator substantially reduced the CPU time using an analytical model for the alpha-particle-induced charge collection. By analysing the soft error modes in DRAM, the bit-bar mode was identified as the main cause of soft error. Using the new SER simulator, SER of 256M DRAM was investigated and it was found that the storage capacitance had a 5fF margin.

• Journal of the Korean Operations Research and Management Science Society
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• v.31 no.3
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• pp.1-10
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• 2006

In this paper we deal with a cell planning issue arisen in a CDMA based multicast network. In a CDMA based wireless network, a terminal can significantly reduce the bit error rate via the cohesion of data streams from multiple base stations. In this case, multiple base stations have to be operated according to a common time line. The cells whose base stations are operated as such are called soft-combined cells. Therefore, a terminal can take advantage of error rate reduction, if the terminal is in a soft-combined cell and at least one neighboring cell is also soft-combined. However, as soft-combining operation gives heavy burden to the network controller, the limited number of cells can be soft-combined. Our problem us to find a limited number of soft-combined cells such that the benefit of the soft-combining operation is maximized.