Introduction to SER & Testing Challenges

Energetic particles existing in the space environment or in the Earth's atmosphere can affect the operation of microelectronic circuits. This tutorial will describe main issues (methodology, hardware platform) related with the evaluation of the sensitivity of complex circuits, such as processors, to one of the critical effects of radiation, the Single Event Upset (SEU) or Soft Error phenomena, which may result in spurious modifications of the circuit's memory cells contents. SEU qualification performed by means of ground based accelerated testing (using particle accelerators) combined with fault injection sessions allow to accurately estimate the error rate of a given architecture. Main techniques allowing mitigating the effects of SEUs are also described.

Raoul Velazco got the PhD and the Doctor ès Sciences in Computer Sciences in 1979 and 1990 respectively, both from INPG (Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble). Dr. Velazco has worked at CNRS (French Research Agency) since 1984, where he is Director of Researches. Since 1995 he has headed the "Circuit Qualification" research group at TIMA laboratory (Grenoble). His main research activities focus on the study of radiation effects on microelectronic circuits, related design hardening techniques and the development and exploitation of experiments devoted to operate on board satellites. He is the author or co-author of more than 170 publications, many of them in the prestigeous IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science.