Physical Implementation of a Radiation-Hardened-By-Construction Microprocessor

Integrated Circuits (ICs) have become more vulnerable to faults and errors such as those introduced by ionizing radiation and by ele ctrostatic and -magnetic interference. This problem occurs with greater frequency in the avionics environment and has even caused co mmercial plane crashes. Given ICs' ubiquity in naval aircraft (e.g., F-35 Lightning II, Boeing F/A-18E/F,E-2 Hawkeye, E-6 Mercury), soft error mitigation approaches are necessarybut ones that alter the hardware are more expensive, perform more poorly, and requir e longer fabrication time. The proposed work will improve reliability by exploiting masking properties within conventional commercia l design flows to build a reliability-aware microcontroller that will reduce, eliminate,and/or otherwise mitigate soft faults and e rrors in off-the-shelf ICs for naval rad-hard applications.The proposed project would improve reliability by altering the logic synt hesis and physical design algorithms within the design flow. Current commercial design flows of digital ICs incorporate the use of c ell libraries, which contain standard implementations of common logic functions, to automate the design and fabrication of a system. The goal of the proposed work isto mitigate soft errors by exploiting masking properties within this flow. The proposed work will explore reliability-aware logic synthesis and physical design algorithms that create correct-byconstruction ICs without impacting p erformance. By identifying the slack in each stage of the design, mitigation techniques will be inserted into the design without inc reasing area, power, and/or delay. The design flow will be used to build a reliability-aware microcontroller that willbe tested thr ough simulation, using GDB-based code emulating upsets, and experimentation, using pulsed-laser fault injection techniques at the Na val Research Laboratory. Creating a methodology to identify ways to improve reliability without impacting performance will make comm ercial-off-the-shelf ICs more reliable and improve the performance of rad-hardapplication-specific ICs.