CALCULATION OF THE SOFT ERROR RATE OF SUBMICRON CMOS LOGIC-CIRCUITS

A method to calculate the soft error rate (SER) of CMOS logic circuits with dynamic pipeline registers is described, This methods takes into account charge collection by drift and diffusion, The method is verif ied by comparison of calculated SER's to measurement results, Using th is method, the SER of a highly pipelined multiplier is calculated as a function of supply voltage for a 0.6 mu m, 0.3 mu m, and 0.12 mu m te chnology, respectively, It has been found that the SER of such highly pipelined submicron CMOS circuits may become too high so that counterm easures have to be taken, Since the SER greatly increases with decreas ing supply voltage, low-power/low-voltage circuits may show more than eight times the SER for half the normal supply voltage as compared to conventional designs.