A Hybrid Hardening Strategy for Circuit Soft-error-tolerance Based on Timing Priority

In order to reduce effectively the hardware and timing overhead for circuit soft-error-tolerance, a hybrid hardening technique for soft error tolerance is proposed based on timing priority in this paper. A two-stage hardening strategy is exploitsed by using flip-flop replacement and duplicated gate method to harden circuit. At first stage, based on the timing priority principle, high reliability temporal redundancy flip-flop is used to harden circuit on the path of timing slack. At second stage, duplicated gate method is used on timing sensitive path. Compared with traditional techniques, the proposed technique can not only mask the Single Event Transient (SET) and protect against the Single Event Upset (SEU), but also reduce the overhead of the area. The experiment result of ISCAS89 benchmark circuits in 45 nm Nangate process proves that the circuit average soft error rate is reduced by more than 99% and the average area overhead is 36.84%.