ModLyng™ Radiation Hardened By Design Toolkit

The ModLyng Radiation Hardened By Design (RHBD) Toolkit is a collection of libraries and tools (LynRad) which provide a modeling and analysis capability for Single Event Upset (SEU) behaviors in deep sub-micron processes. 

The RHBD toolkit provides a way for processes to be systematically modeled for radiation-induced upset vulnerability and circuit designs and cell libraries automatically analyzed. The result is reduced cost and/or improved quality of the design.

 

Key Benefits

  • Add radiation awareness to your existing IC design flows
  • Reduce by orders of magnitude the time for RHBD-enabled simulation (as compared to TCAD, mixed-mode), thereby allowing a user to trade off total RHBD verification time and test coverage.
  • Use graphical, object-oriented building blocks to create advanced SEU experiments.
  • Simulate radiation effects in your circuit-design simulator, without modifying the design or PDK
  • Allows a radiation expert to quickly create SEU-enabled models of semiconductor devices; allows a circuit designer to determine the radiation sensitivity of their circuit or cell library without help from the radiation expert.

Key Features

  • Graphical composition of radiation-enabled models from libraries of building blocks
  • “Out-of-the-box” support for IBM 90nm processes
  • Layout analysis of designs from GDS-2 for radiation vulnerability
  • SEU sensitivity analysis and experiment creation in a well-defined, repeatable and easily understood manner
  • Automatic, detailed RHBD report analysis in HTML or PDF
  • Standard Verilog-A HDL Support

Technical Specifications

  • ModLyng toolkit with its own license
  • Platforms: Linux
  • Export languages: Verilog-A (Cadence Spectre®)

 

Overview

As IC designs continue to scale down in size and scale up in complexity, the effects of radiation become harder to ignore.  Whether from terrestrial sources or for targeted space-bound applications, single event upsets may cause seemingly unpredictable faults in analog and digital circuitry.  Further, as process nodes continue to shrink past 100nm, radiation-induced upsets affecting multiple devices simultaneously become more prevalent.  This makes a difficult problem nearly intractable without a systematic modeling and analysis approach.  The models and analysis capability that have traditionally been brought the bear on these issues include macro-modeled current sources at the SPICE level, or Technology CAD (TCAD) or mixed-mode analysis for more detailed analysis.  None of these has offered a complete solution in terms of performance, accuracy or RH design productivity.

Enter ModLyng RHBD Toolkit.  This unique methodology allows a user to systematically analyze, model and predict the effect of charge-particle-induced SETs in a SPICE circuit-design environment, without modification of the process delivery kit or circuit design.  The libraries included allow you to jump start your SEU modeling capability for analyzing circuits and cell libraries through the provided advanced geometry-aware SEU radiation models.   While the power of these model libraries alone may greatly enhance existing modeling activities, the RHBD toolkit comes with much, much more.  The RHBD toolkit also includes LynRad, an industry-first SEU analysis tool, supporting both SEU-aware layout analysis for automatic back annotation of designs for radiation-enabled simulations.  The strike scenarios are automatically derived from the  radiation aware layout analysis producing efficient simulation of multiple device singe event upsets.

 

The RHDB Toolkit

The purpose of the RHBD toolkit is twofold.  First, it may be used by radiation experts to enhance and extend semiconductor device models in support of advanced radiation effects.  You may import existing HDL models for this task and combine them with the RHBD toolkit models, or simply use one of Lynguent’s pre-configured toolkit models, such as the BSIM4TK.  The result of this activity is a radiation-enhanced PDK-compatible device model which may be dropped into your SPICE simulation environment in compiled Verilog-A form with ease from the ModLyng IME.


Radiation effects are at your fingertips in the RHBD toolkit.  Simply drag into any compact model (BSIM4 shown).

Of course, such a model is only useful for RHBD activities if it can be applied to circuit designs.  This is where the second purpose of RHBDTK comes into play; the LynRad modeling and analysis tools.  LynRad first allows you to analyze your existing circuit layouts for vulnerability analysis, generating concise reports of devices which may be vulnerable to upset as a group, a power analysis capability all its own.1   However, LynRad does not stop there; it next creates a back-annotated model of your circuit, with all vulnerable devices labeled and SEU models parameterized.  LynRad then executes, per your instructions, and combination of strikes to device groups, generating a concise vulnerability report in minutes.  Compare that to the hours of configuration and sometimes days of analysis required for traditional TCAD.


Circuit Design:   Analyzed, modeled and simulated using the RHBDTK LynRad method


1 Layout analysis requires Mentor Calibre®