Soft Error Susceptibility Analysis of SRAM-Based FPGAs in High-Performance Information Systems

SOFT errors are intermittent malfunctions of hardware that are not reproducible. These errors, also called transient errors, occur more often than permanent errors. Single Event Upsets (SEUs) that cause soft errors are generated by cosmic particles, energetic neutrons, and alpha particles hitting the surface of silicon devices. Device scaling significantly affects the susceptibility of integrated circuits to soft errors. As the feature size shrinks, the amount of charge per device decreases thereby enabling a particle strike to be much more likely to cause an error. As a result, particles of lower energy, which are far more plentiful, can generate sufficient charge to cause a soft error.