A Fast Simulation Method for Analysis of SEE in VLSI

The transistor simulation tools (e.g. TCAD and SPICE) are widely used to simulate single event effects (SEE) in industry. However, due to the variances of the physical parameters in practical design, e.g. the nature of the particle, linear energy transfer and circuit characteristics would have a large impacts on the final simulation accuracy, which will significantly increase the complexity and cost in the workflow of the transistor level simulation for large scale circuits. Therefore, a new SEE simulation scheme is proposed to offer a fast and cost-efficient method to evaluate and compare the performance of large scale circuits in the effects of radiation particles. In this work, we have combined both the advantages of transistor and hardware description language (HDL) simulations, and proposed accurate SEE digital error models for high-speed error analysis in the large scale circuits. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme is able to handle SEE simulations for more than 40 different circuits with the sizes varied from 100 transistors to 100 k transistors.