Reliable and Continuous Measurement of SET Pulse Widths

Abstract - Gaining better insights into propagation and masking of radiation induced faults at some point requires the conduction of physical experiments. In our attempt to design a target ASIC for such experiments we elaborated an on-chip infrastructure that allows recording the pulse width of radiation induced voltage transients. Its unique properties are the ability to record more than one of these measurement values before having to be read out, and to be radiation tolerant. By careful circuit design and an unconventional redundancy architecture we obtained an infrastructure that provides the required features while being extremely area efficient. We motivate and present our proposed circuit architecture and evaluate it by means of a fault dictionary as well as simulation results.