@phdthesis{SchulzHanke2023, author = {Schulz-Hanke, Christian}, title = {BCH Codes mit kombinierter Korrektur und Erkennung}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-61794}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-617943}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {ii, 191}, year = {2023}, abstract = {BCH Codes mit kombinierter Korrektur und Erkennung In dieser Arbeit wird auf Grundlage des BCH Codes untersucht, wie eine Fehlerkorrektur mit einer Erkennung h{\"o}herer Fehleranzahlen kombiniert werden kann. Mit dem Verfahren der 1-Bit Korrektur mit zus{\"a}tzlicher Erkennung h{\"o}herer Fehler wurde ein Ansatz entwickelt, welcher die Erkennung zus{\"a}tzlicher Fehler durch das parallele L{\"o}sen einfacher Gleichungen der Form s_x = s_1^x durchf{\"u}hrt. Die Anzahl dieser Gleichungen ist linear zu der Anzahl der zu {\"u}berpr{\"u}fenden h{\"o}heren Fehler. In dieser Arbeit wurde zus{\"a}tzlich f{\"u}r bis zu 4-Bit Korrekturen mit zus{\"a}tzlicher Erkennung h{\"o}herer Fehler ein weiterer allgemeiner Ansatz vorgestellt. Dabei werden parallel f{\"u}r alle korrigierbaren Fehleranzahlen spekulative Fehlerkorrekturen durchgef{\"u}hrt. Aus den bestimmten Fehlerstellen werden spekulative Syndromkomponenten erzeugt, durch welche die Fehlerstellen best{\"a}tigt und h{\"o}here erkennbare Fehleranzahlen ausgeschlossen werden k{\"o}nnen. Die vorgestellten Ans{\"a}tze unterscheiden sich von dem in entwickelten Ansatz, bei welchem die Anzahl der Fehlerstellen durch die Berechnung von Determinanten in absteigender Reihenfolge berechnet wird, bis die erste Determinante 0 bildet. Bei dem bekannten Verfahren ist durch die Berechnung der Determinanten eine faktorielle Anzahl an Berechnungen in Relation zu der Anzahl zu {\"u}berpr{\"u}fender Fehler durchzuf{\"u}hren. Im Vergleich zu dem bekannten sequentiellen Verfahrens nach Berlekamp Massey besitzen die Berechnungen im vorgestellten Ansatz simple Gleichungen und k{\"o}nnen parallel durchgef{\"u}hrt werden.Bei dem bekannten Verfahren zur parallelen Korrektur von 4-Bit Fehlern ist eine Gleichung vierten Grades im GF(2^m) zu l{\"o}sen. Dies erfolgt, indem eine Hilfsgleichung dritten Grades und vier Gleichungen zweiten Grades parallel gel{\"o}st werden. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wurde gezeigt, dass sich eine Gleichung zweiten Grades einsparen l{\"a}sst, wodurch sich eine Vereinfachung der Hardware bei einer parallelen Realisierung der 4-Bit Korrektur ergibt. Die erzielten Ergebnisse wurden durch umfangreiche Simulationen in Software und Hardwareimplementierungen {\"u}berpr{\"u}ft.}, language = {de} } @phdthesis{Andjelkovic2021, author = {Andjelkovic, Marko}, title = {A methodology for characterization, modeling and mitigation of single event transient effects in CMOS standard combinational cells}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-53484}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-534843}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {xxiv, 216}, year = {2021}, abstract = {With the downscaling of CMOS technologies, the radiation-induced Single Event Transient (SET) effects in combinational logic have become a critical reliability issue for modern integrated circuits (ICs) intended for operation under harsh radiation conditions. The SET pulses generated in combinational logic may propagate through the circuit and eventually result in soft errors. It has thus become an imperative to address the SET effects in the early phases of the radiation-hard IC design. In general, the soft error mitigation solutions should accommodate both static and dynamic measures to ensure the optimal utilization of available resources. An efficient soft-error-aware design should address synergistically three main aspects: (i) characterization and modeling of soft errors, (ii) multi-level soft error mitigation, and (iii) online soft error monitoring. Although significant results have been achieved, the effectiveness of SET characterization methods, accuracy of predictive SET models, and efficiency of SET mitigation measures are still critical issues. Therefore, this work addresses the following topics: (i) Characterization and modeling of SET effects in standard combinational cells, (ii) Static mitigation of SET effects in standard combinational cells, and (iii) Online particle detection, as a support for dynamic soft error mitigation. Since the standard digital libraries are widely used in the design of radiation-hard ICs, the characterization of SET effects in standard cells and the availability of accurate SET models for the Soft Error Rate (SER) evaluation are the main prerequisites for efficient radiation-hard design. This work introduces an approach for the SPICE-based standard cell characterization with the reduced number of simulations, improved SET models and optimized SET sensitivity database. It has been shown that the inherent similarities in the SET response of logic cells for different input levels can be utilized to reduce the number of required simulations. Based on characterization results, the fitting models for the SET sensitivity metrics (critical charge, generated SET pulse width and propagated SET pulse width) have been developed. The proposed models are based on the principle of superposition, and they express explicitly the dependence of the SET sensitivity of individual combinational cells on design, operating and irradiation parameters. In contrast to the state-of-the-art characterization methodologies which employ extensive look-up tables (LUTs) for storing the simulation results, this work proposes the use of LUTs for storing the fitting coefficients of the SET sensitivity models derived from the characterization results. In that way the amount of characterization data in the SET sensitivity database is reduced significantly. The initial step in enhancing the robustness of combinational logic is the application of gate-level mitigation techniques. As a result, significant improvement of the overall SER can be achieved with minimum area, delay and power overheads. For the SET mitigation in standard cells, it is essential to employ the techniques that do not require modifying the cell structure. This work introduces the use of decoupling cells for improving the robustness of standard combinational cells. By insertion of two decoupling cells at the output of a target cell, the critical charge of the cell's output node is increased and the attenuation of short SETs is enhanced. In comparison to the most common gate-level techniques (gate upsizing and gate duplication), the proposed approach provides better SET filtering. However, as there is no single gate-level mitigation technique with optimal performance, a combination of multiple techniques is required. This work introduces a comprehensive characterization of gate-level mitigation techniques aimed to quantify their impact on the SET robustness improvement, as well as introduced area, delay and power overhead per gate. By characterizing the gate-level mitigation techniques together with the standard cells, the required effort in subsequent SER analysis of a target design can be reduced. The characterization database of the hardened standard cells can be utilized as a guideline for selection of the most appropriate mitigation solution for a given design. As a support for dynamic soft error mitigation techniques, it is important to enable the online detection of energetic particles causing the soft errors. This allows activating the power-greedy fault-tolerant configurations based on N-modular redundancy only at the high radiation levels. To enable such a functionality, it is necessary to monitor both the particle flux and the variation of particle LET, as these two parameters contribute significantly to the system SER. In this work, a particle detection approach based on custom-sized pulse stretching inverters is proposed. Employing the pulse stretching inverters connected in parallel enables to measure the particle flux in terms of the number of detected SETs, while the particle LET variations can be estimated from the distribution of SET pulse widths. This approach requires a purely digital processing logic, in contrast to the standard detectors which require complex mixed-signal processing. Besides the possibility of LET monitoring, additional advantages of the proposed particle detector are low detection latency and power consumption, and immunity to error accumulation. The results achieved in this thesis can serve as a basis for establishment of an overall soft-error-aware database for a given digital library, and a comprehensive multi-level radiation-hard design flow that can be implemented with the standard IC design tools. The following step will be to evaluate the achieved results with the irradiation experiments.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Schrape2023, author = {Schrape, Oliver}, title = {Methodology for standard cell-based design and implementation of reliable and robust hardware systems}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-58932}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-589326}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {xi, 181}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Reliable and robust data processing is one of the hardest requirements for systems in fields such as medicine, security, automotive, aviation, and space, to prevent critical system failures caused by changes in operating or environmental conditions. In particular, Signal Integrity (SI) effects such as crosstalk may distort the signal information in sensitive mixed-signal designs. A challenge for hardware systems used in the space are radiation effects. Namely, Single Event Effects (SEEs) induced by high-energy particle hits may lead to faulty computation, corrupted configuration settings, undesired system behavior, or even total malfunction. Since these applications require an extra effort in design and implementation, it is beneficial to master the standard cell design process and corresponding design flow methodologies optimized for such challenges. Especially for reliable, low-noise differential signaling logic such as Current Mode Logic (CML), a digital design flow is an orthogonal approach compared to traditional manual design. As a consequence, mandatory preliminary considerations need to be addressed in more detail. First of all, standard cell library concepts with suitable cell extensions for reliable systems and robust space applications have to be elaborated. Resulting design concepts at the cell level should enable the logical synthesis for differential logic design or improve the radiation-hardness. In parallel, the main objectives of the proposed cell architectures are to reduce the occupied area, power, and delay overhead. Second, a special setup for standard cell characterization is additionally required for a proper and accurate logic gate modeling. Last but not least, design methodologies for mandatory design flow stages such as logic synthesis and place and route need to be developed for the respective hardware systems to keep the reliability or the radiation-hardness at an acceptable level. This Thesis proposes and investigates standard cell-based design methodologies and techniques for reliable and robust hardware systems implemented in a conventional semi-conductor technology. The focus of this work is on reliable differential logic design and robust radiation-hardening-by-design circuits. The synergistic connections of the digital design flow stages are systematically addressed for these two types of hardware systems. In more detail, a library for differential logic is extended with single-ended pseudo-gates for intermediate design steps to support the logic synthesis and layout generation with commercial Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools. Special cell layouts are proposed to relax signal routing. A library set for space applications is similarly extended by novel Radiation-Hardening-by-Design (RHBD) Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) cells, enabling a one fault correction. Therein, additional optimized architectures for glitch filter cells, robust scannable and self-correcting flip-flops, and clock-gates are proposed. The circuit concepts and the physical layout representation views of the differential logic gates and the RHBD cells are discussed. However, the quality of results of designs depends implicitly on the accuracy of the standard cell characterization which is examined for both types therefore. The entire design flow is elaborated from the hardware design description to the layout representations. A 2-Phase routing approach together with an intermediate design conversion step is proposed after the initial place and route stage for reliable, pure differential designs, whereas a special constraining for RHBD applications in a standard technology is presented. The digital design flow for differential logic design is successfully demonstrated on a reliable differential bipolar CML application. A balanced routing result of its differential signal pairs is obtained by the proposed 2-Phase-routing approach. Moreover, the elaborated standard cell concepts and design methodology for RHBD circuits are applied to the digital part of a 7.5-15.5 MSPS 14-bit Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and a complex microcontroller architecture. The ADC is implemented in an unhardened standard semiconductor technology and successfully verified by electrical measurements. The overhead of the proposed hardening approach is additionally evaluated by design exploration of the microcontroller application. Furthermore, the first obtained related measurement results of novel RHBD-∆TMR flip-flops show a radiation-tolerance up to a threshold Linear Energy Transfer (LET) of 46.1, 52.0, and 62.5 MeV cm2 mg-1 and savings in silicon area of 25-50 \% for selected TMR standard cell candidates. As a conclusion, the presented design concepts at the cell and library levels, as well as the design flow modifications are adaptable and transferable to other technology nodes. In particular, the design of hybrid solutions with integrated reliable differential logic modules together with robust radiation-tolerant circuit parts is enabled by the standard cell concepts and design methods proposed in this work.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Chen2023, author = {Chen, Junchao}, title = {A self-adaptive resilient method for implementing and managing the high-reliability processing system}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-58313}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-583139}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {XXIII, 167}, year = {2023}, abstract = {As a result of CMOS scaling, radiation-induced Single-Event Effects (SEEs) in electronic circuits became a critical reliability issue for modern Integrated Circuits (ICs) operating under harsh radiation conditions. SEEs can be triggered in combinational or sequential logic by the impact of high-energy particles, leading to destructive or non-destructive faults, resulting in data corruption or even system failure. Typically, the SEE mitigation methods are deployed statically in processing architectures based on the worst-case radiation conditions, which is most of the time unnecessary and results in a resource overhead. Moreover, the space radiation conditions are dynamically changing, especially during Solar Particle Events (SPEs). The intensity of space radiation can differ over five orders of magnitude within a few hours or days, resulting in several orders of magnitude fault probability variation in ICs during SPEs. This thesis introduces a comprehensive approach for designing a self-adaptive fault resilient multiprocessing system to overcome the static mitigation overhead issue. This work mainly addresses the following topics: (1) Design of on-chip radiation particle monitor for real-time radiation environment detection, (2) Investigation of space environment predictor, as support for solar particle events forecast, (3) Dynamic mode configuration in the resilient multiprocessing system. Therefore, according to detected and predicted in-flight space radiation conditions, the target system can be configured to use no mitigation or low-overhead mitigation during non-critical periods of time. The redundant resources can be used to improve system performance or save power. On the other hand, during increased radiation activity periods, such as SPEs, the mitigation methods can be dynamically configured appropriately depending on the real-time space radiation environment, resulting in higher system reliability. Thus, a dynamic trade-off in the target system between reliability, performance and power consumption in real-time can be achieved. All results of this work are evaluated in a highly reliable quad-core multiprocessing system that allows the self-adaptive setting of optimal radiation mitigation mechanisms during run-time. Proposed methods can serve as a basis for establishing a comprehensive self-adaptive resilient system design process. Successful implementation of the proposed design in the quad-core multiprocessor shows its application perspective also in the other designs.}, language = {en} }