Event-driven transient error propagation: A scalable and accurate soft error rate estimation approach

Fast and accurate soft error vulnerability assessment is an integral part of cost-effective robust system design. The de facto approach is expensive fault simulation or emulation in which the error is injected in random bits and cycles, and then the effect is simulated for millions of cycles. In this paper, we propose a novel alternative approach to obtain the soft error vulnerability by integrating transient error propagation in an event-driven gate-level logic simulator which captures the combined effect of various masking factors. By carefully combining various generated errors at different cycles, in one pass all the error generation and propagation effects across all bits and all cycles are analyzed. This enables us to drastically reduce the runtime while maintaining the accuracy compared to statistical fault injection.