Abstract

Space radiation and nuclear reactors produce single event effects (SEE) in electronic circuits and impact their performance. The SEE phenomena cause circuits and electronic devices to fail by producing faulty results. Therefore, today’s circuit’s reliability is a significant concern for all circuit designers.

This thesis suggests a new automated flow to measure the single-event-transient (SET) effects in combinational circuits in application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) while reaching full fault coverage. The developed flow characterizes the whole circuit nodes by identifying the most sensitive paths to the propagated SET pulses from the node under test to an observable primary output, causing single event upsets (SEUs).

The flow generates test vectors to reach the combinational circuit's highest possible fault coverage percentage. The generated test vectors guarantee that no logical masking for detected SET faults. Then, it analyzes each test vector independently to detect different sensitized paths possible for SET fault propagation. Then, the flow searches for the most sensitive path from the node under test to an observable primary output while measuring the minimal SET pulse characteristics that would produce SEUs. This approach also suggests a new enhanced metric is to identify which test vector enhances the propagated SET pulse within a combinational circuit, which is vital to find worst-case test vectors.

School

School of Sciences and Engineering

Department

Electronics & Communications Engineering Department

Degree Name

MS in Electronics & Communication Engineering

Graduation Date

Fall 1-13-2022

Submission Date

1-18-2022

First Advisor

Ahmed Abou-Auf

Committee Member 1

Yehea Ismail

Committee Member 2

Amr Wassal

Extent

105

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Approval

Not necessary for this item

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