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Doctor's Theses (authored and supervised):

V. S. Veeravalli:
"Design of Custom ASIC for Radiation Experiments to Study Single Event Effects";
Supervisor, Reviewer: C. Metra, M. Krstic; Technische Informatik, 2017; oral examination: 2017-11-24.



English abstract:
Technology scaling has made the transistors increasingly susceptible to radiation
particle strikes. As a consequence, particles with lower energy - which are substantially
more frequent - can already cause non-destructive single event effects in
CMOS circuits. Understanding them is not very straightforward, as there are so
many parameters involved along with these effects, like radiation particle strikesī
strength, target circuit, path of propagation, and surrounding environment. Our goal
in this thesis is to study these effects in digital CMOS circuits and aid construction
of efficient radiation tolerant circuits. Firstly, the effectiveness of the existing radiation
hardening techniques to particle hits in digital CMOS circuits has been mainly
studied in this thesis (under a given set of environmental conditions). We explicitly
analyze how the performance of two selected radiation hardening techniques,
namely transistor sizing and stack separation, when exposed to particle hits varies
with temperature and supply voltage.
We present design aims and concepts as well as implementation results of a digital
ASIC that is dedicated as a target for long-term irradiation experiments. Its sole
purpose is to study susceptibility to radiation as well as propagation of radiation effects,
and aid in understanding the same. The infrastructure should be able to record
the SETs, in spite of the need of being tolerant to particle strikes in itself that cannot
be avoided in some types of radiation experiments. The problem of devising a
suitable infrastructure lies in the partly contradictory requirements, like constrained
area, radiation tolerance and good resolution of the location and propagation path
of particle hits. This was a major challenge in our thesis.
To analyze single-event-transient (SET) sensitivity in digital CMOS circuits we
propose an on-chip measurement architecture for various target circuit blocks. We
also propose an architecture that allows tracing, generation and propagation of SETs
in the Sklansky adder and inverter tree. Our measurement architectures are based
on non-rad-hard counters namely, linear feedback shift registers and Muller pipeline
based up/down counters. The design evaluation is done by means of comprehensive
fault injection experiments, which are based on detailed Spice models of the target
circuits in conjunction with a standard double-exponential current injection model
for single-event transients (SET).We show that the infrastructure is resilient against
double faults, as well as many triple and even higher-multiplicity faults. Together
with a probabilistic analysis and fault dictionary we can conclude that the proposed
architectures will indeed sustain significant target hit rates, without exceeding the
resilience bound of the measurement infrastructure.
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Finally to measure SET pulsewidths in any digital circuit a unique on-chip measurement
infrastructure is proposed. Unlike the known oscilloscope-based methods,
our approach is all-digital: SET durations are measured by the SET-gated counting
of pulses generated by a high-frequency ring oscillator, and stored in an up/downcounter
array organized in a ring. We carefully elaborate a comprehensive concept
for making our infrastructure SEU tolerant, again with the main challenge being to
attain a sufficiently high probability of recording useful hits in the target before exhausting
the SEU tolerance of the infrastructure. Our key contribution here concerns
the protection of the counter array: Rather than resorting to radiation hardening or
explicit triple modular redundancy (TMR), we save area by using a novel redundant
duplex counter architecture: For a small number of recorded SETs, our architecture
implicitly implements TMR, albeit in a way that degrades gracefully for larger
numbers of recorded SETs.
We have presented the measurement infrastructure and a detailed pre-fabrication
analysis of the circuits hosted in the digital ASIC. We sketch our respective solutions
for the on-chip transmission architecture and present the resulting area distribution
of the final ASIC layout which has been performed for an industrial 65nm
bulk CMOS process. We also show how we optimized the layout for the purpose
of our experiments and present all relevant implementation details. The datasheet
of the ASIC that is of paramount importance is presented in great detail. Moreover,
an overview of the experimental setup is presented and some specific details are
highlighted.


Related Projects:
Project Head Andreas Steininger:
Analysis & Modeling of Single-Event-Transients in VLSI Chips