Error, soft

One of the more important applications of ion implantation is well engineering at relatively high ion energies. For the protection of dynamic random access memories from soft errors, different structures have been proposed and employed. The conventional procedure is to use epitaxial wafers well engineering beneath the active p- and n-channels provides a less expensive alternative. 

A barrier coating may also be required for protection against alpha particles. High-density devices can suffer soft errors when alpha particles emitted from trace quantities of thorium or uranium in packaging materials strike the active surface. Thus, the surface must be protected against this possibility. Polyimides are again recommended for such applications. 

There are two types of memory problems hard errors and soft errors. We ll discuss these in reverse order. 

Soft errors occur once and disappear after the computer is rebooted. They are usually caused by power fluctuations or single bit errors. The symptoms are typically unexplained problems with software and are not reproducible. Soft errors are like gnats annoying little things you wish you could kill, but they don t stay in one place long enough for you to do so. However, if these errors increase in frequency, it usually indicates a hard memory error is about to occur. 

The last topic you learned about in this chapter is how to troubleshoot various memory problems. You primarily learned about the two main types of memory errors soft errors and hard errors. Soft errors are random errors that occur and that are cured by a simple reboot of the computer. They will disappear upon reboot. Hard errors are usually the result of a failed memory component. They will recur even after a reboot and usually require the replacement of memory. 

Vol. 34 Radiation Effects and Soft Errors in Integrated Circuits and Electronic Devices eds. R. D. Schrimpf and D. M. Fleetwood... 

Of all impurity elements, in particular uranium and thorium contents must be extremely low. These naturally radioactive elements cause soft errors in memory circuits due to a-particle emission. 

Finally, a soft error correction decoding algorithm, e.g., a Viterbi decoder, is used to compute for / = 0,..., - 1, the most likely watennark message u from the prob-... 

As the denuded zone concept relies essentially on a two layer system other applications seem to be possible, which heavily depend on material with layered differences in lifetime (diffusion length). One of the areas is in the field of --particle sensitivity. 06 -particles emitted from the device package or from the environment create electron-hole pairs, which may lead to soft errors in memories. This can be suppressed if the carriers generated recombine at the oxygen precipitates rather than being able to diffuse to the memory cells. 

Soft errors can be detected and corrected by the system s logic, meaning that it does not require a hard reset to recover from an error. Sections 7.1.2 and 7.2.2 present neutron irradiation experiments simulating the effect of SEE in Flash-base and SRAM-based FPGAs, while Chaps. 5 and 6 present fault injection simulation experiments simulating SEEs at RTL level and in the configuration memoiy bitstream, respectively. In this work, SEUs and SETs will be used to describe transient faults that the proposed techniques can cope with. 

AZAMBUJA, J. SOUSA, F ROSA, L. KASTENSMIDT, F. The limitations of software signature and basic block sizing in soft error fault coverage. In LATIN AMERICAN TEST WORKSHOP, LATW 2010. Proceedings... Los Alamitos, USA IEEE Computer Society, 2010. 

BAUMANN, R. Soft errors in advanced semiconductor devices-part I the three radiation sources. IEEE Transactions on Device and Materials Reliability, Los Alamitos, USA IEEE Computer Society, 2001, v. 1, n. 1, pp. 17-22. 

BOLCHINI, C. MIELE, A. SALICE, E SCIUTO, D. A model of soft error effects in generic IP processors. In INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON DEEECT AND EAULT TOLERANCE IN VLSI, 2005. Proceedings... Los Alamitos, USA IEEE Computer Society, 2005. 

CUENCA-ASENSI, S. MARTINEZ-ALVAREZ, A. RESTREPO-CALLE, E PALOMO, E GUZMAN-MIRANDA, H. AGUIRRE, M. A novel co-design approach for soft errors mitigation in embedded systems. IEEE Transactions On Nuclear Science, Los Alamitos, USA IEEE Computer Society, 2011, v. 58, n. 3, pp. 1059-1065. 

ENTRENA, L. GARCIA-VALDERAS, M. FERNANDEZ-CARDENAL, R. LINDOSO, A. LOPEZ-ONGIL, C. Soft error sensitivity evaluation of microprocessors by multilevel emulation-based fault injection. IEEE Transactions on Cmnputers, 2010, v. 61, n. 3, pp. 313-322. 

NICOLAIDIS, M. Time redundancy based soft-error tolerance to rescue nanometer technologies. In IEEE VLSI TEST SUMPOSIUM, 17., VTS 1999, Dana Point, USA. Proceedings... Washington, DC, USA IEEE Computer Society, 1999. pp. 86-94. 

NIEUWLAND, A. JASAREVIC, S. JERIN, G. Combinational logic soft error analysis and protection. In IEEE INTERNATIONAL ON-LINE TEST SYMPOSIUM, 12., lOLTS 2006, Lake of Como, ITA. Proceedings... Los Alamitos, USA IEEE Computer Society, 2006. pp. 99-104. 

NPPC [22] is a binary classifier and it classifies a pattern by the proximity of a test pattern to one of the two planes as shown in Fig. 5. The two planes are obtained by solving two nonlinear programming problems (NPP) with a quadratic form of loss function. Each plane is clustered around a particular class of data by minimizing sum squared distances of patterns from it and considering the patterns of the others class at a distance of 1 with soft errors. Thus, the objective of NPPC is to find two hyperplanes ... 

When hardware failure is a root cause for software error (1. b), we could keep this event within the boundary of hardware component failure when we loose just recovery action (made by software). The problem is that those types of hardware failures are so called soft errors , i.e. stochastically occurring events automatically repaired and it is questionable, whether they were reported when data for reliabihty parameters were gathered. Nevertheless, the uncertainty of e.g. processors failure rates is typically so high that treatment of hardware-software interface failures as just hardware errors seems to be justifiable. Moreover this kind of failures is basically not suspected fi om CCF (Common Cause Failures) potential. 

The demand for high purity metals has tremendously increased due to needs in the information technology and telecommunications industries. High purity Al is used in various microelectronic devices and semiconductor detectors are made of hyperpure Ge and Si, etc. Impurity levels depend upon both the raw material and the purification method and may influence the function of the device. For example, in semiconductor materials, alpha particle emission creates damage causing the so-called soft error effect. For this reason, U and Th levels are strictly limited in these applications. 

Alpha particle A product given off by the decay of radioactive material (usually emitted by traces of radioactivity in IC ceramic packaging materials). This particle has a positive charge equal to twice that of an electron and is emitted at a very high velocity. Alpha particles can cause temporary memory upsets in DRAMs, which is known as soft error rate. 

Soft error An error, or upset in the output of a part (usuaUy appHes to memory devices for a single bit output error), which does not reoccur (i.e., the device performs to specifications when tested after the failure occurred). 

Schaefer, S. 1994. DRAM soft error rate calculations. Design Line, 3(1). 

Radiation failures are principally caused by uranium and thorium contaminants and secondary cosmic rays. Radiation can cause wearout, aging, embrittlement of materials, or overstress soft errors in such electronic hardware as logic chips. Chemical failures occur in adverse chemical environments that result in corrosion, oxidation, or ionic surface dendritic growth. There may also be interactions between different types of stresses. For example, metal migration maybe accelerated in the presence of chemical contaminants and composition gradients and a thermal load can accelerate the failure mechanism due to a thermal expansion mismatch. 

There is an increasing amount of li t sensitive opto-devioes that need UV-VIS protection. Alpha particle radiation is caused by a very low level of uranium and cosmic radiation present as background radiation in the device package and the atmosphere, respectively, and which could generate a temporary soft error in operating dynamic random access memory (DRAM), such as the 64 K, 256 K, 1 and 4 Megabits DRAM devices. This type of alpha particle radiation has become a major concern, especially in high density memory devices. 

May, T.C. and Woods, M.H., Alpha-particle-induced soft errors in dynamic... 

It was first reported in 1978 that memorized information disappeared because of a-rays emitted from the package Since then various approaches have been taken from both the device side and the package side to reduce this phenomenon which is known as soft error so.si. 121,123) following features. 

---