Retiming for soft error minimization under error-latching window constraints

Abstract

Soft error has become a critical reliability issue in nanoscale integrated circuits, especially in sequential circuits where a latched error will be propagated for many cycles and affect many outputs at different time. Retiming is a structural operation that relocates registers in a circuit without changing its functionality. In this paper, the effect of retiming on soft error rate (SER) of a sequential circuit is investigated considering both logic masking and timing masking. A minimum observability retiming problem under error-latching window constraints is formulated to reduce the SER of the circuit. And an efficient algorithm is proposed to solve the problem optimally. Experimental results show on average a 32.7% reduction on SER from the original circuits and a 15% improvement over the existing method.