A prediction technique for single-event effects on complex integrated circuits

The sensitivity of complex integrated circuits to single-event effects is investigated. Sensitivity depends not only on the cross section of physical modules but also on the behavior of data patterns running on the system.A method dividing the main functional modules is proposed. The intrinsic cross section and the duty cycles of different sensitive modules are obtained during the execution of data patterns. A method for extracting the duty cycle is presented and a set of test patterns with different duty cycles are implemented experimentally. By combining the intrinsic cross section and the duty cycle of different sensitive modules, a universal method to predict SEE sensitivities of different test patterns is proposed, which is verified by experiments based on the target circuit of a microprocessor. Experimental results show that the deviation between prediction and experiment is less than 20%.