Single Event Transient injection in large mixed-signal circuits

Radiation can influence the reliability of electronic circuits and systems in a variety of ways. One of the most elusive to detection is the occurrence of Single-Event Transients (SETs): short current pulses can occur in any PN junction of the semiconductor. These short current pulses may then propagate through the circuit and affect operation and reliability. In this paper, we leverage the power of a fault injection tool to the case of Single Events in order to assess the overall robustness of large analog and mixed-signal circuits to these effects. The idea consists in extracting the likelihood of occurrence of the Single Events on different sites from either the layout of the schematic and, with that information, perform a likelihood weighted random sampling to provide a statistically sound estimate of the circuit sensitivity.