Abstract:

The soft error induced by various environment problems,such as radiation and random noise,has emerged as a critical challenge in VLSI designs.Since most of the methods for soft error protection are based on redundancy,the cost of full soft error protection is unacceptable.Thus,the designs can only be selectively protected.The soft error reliability evaluation is the key of selective protection.In order to make costeffective tradeoff between reliability and various overhead from hardening,the soft error reliability evaluation at system level is crucial.The paper firstly classifies the existing systemlevel soft error reliability evaluation approaches by their core techniques;secondly discusses their development and features;finally proposes their remained difficult issues and challenges and predicts their future trends.

Key words: soft error protection;reliability evaluation