Reliable electronics plays a major role in shaping our daily lives, being a key enabler for critical applications, such as space missions, avionics, automotive, medicine, banking, automated industry, wireless communication networks, etc. However, design of highly reliable electronic systems remains a challenge with the advances in semiconductor technology and increase in integrated circuit (IC) complexity. In this work, we introduce the Horizon Europe Twinning project TWIN-RELECT, aimed at strengthening the scientific expertise in designing reliable integrated circuits. The paper presents the general project concept and objectives, and main directions of the joint research activities. The primary scientific goal is to contribute to the development of novel, more efficient, European Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tool-chain for design of reliable chips.

Studying the radiation effects on electronic devices is essential for avionics and space systems. The shrinking technology nodes and increasing density of devices enhance the sensitivity of electronic systems to ionizing radiation. Due to their crucial role, memories and processors are the highest contributors to soft errors in systems, making them the best candidates for studying these effects. This work introduces the radiation environment in space and atmosphere and the main effects that the different types of ionizing particles that are present in these environments may produce on electronic devices. Furthermore, mainly focusing on Single-Event Effects (SEEs), it presents approaches and tools for modeling SEEs and their impact on memories and microprocessors. Additionally, experimental results targeting a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf self-refresh Dynamic RAM are presented. These experiments are based on radiation test campaigns in particle accelerators with neutrons and protons. Finally, an overview of issues and mitigation techniques for microprocessors is exposed.

In current technologies, the robustness of Static Random Access Memories (SRAM) has to be investigated under any possible source of disturbance. In this paper, we evaluate the reliability of an SRAM cell exposed to atmospheric neutron radiation, affected by random threshold voltage variation and under different operation conditions (supply voltage, process corner and temperature). The SRAM cell's Soft Error Rate (SER) at simulation level is estimated using accurate models of atmospheric neutron induced currents. The study shows that in extreme operation conditions and under random process variability, the SER of an SRAM can reach values up to 3X larger than the nominal value, or down to 2X smaller than the nominal value. This large SER range confirms the importance of our study and justifies the need for further evaluation of circuits under radiation at the simulation level.

Electronic system reliability over soft errors is very critical as the transistor size shrinks. Many recent works have defined the device error rate under radiation for SRAMs in hold mode (static) and during operation (dynamic). This paper evaluates the impact of running test algorithms on SRAMs exposed to neutron radiation in order to define their stressing factor. The results that we show are based on experiments performed at the TSL facility in Uppsala, Sweden using a Quasi-Monoenergetic neutron beam. The evaluation of the test algorithms is based on the calculated device SEU cross section.

This paper presents a methodology for analyzing the behavior of nanometer technologies regarding "multiple event transients" (MET) caused by nuclear reaction induced by atmospheric neutrons. For the first time, currents collected by several sensitive areas of an ASIC cell resulting from a nuclear reaction are addressed by simulation. Libraries of several thousand types of currents are obtained for neutron energy range between 1 and 200 MeV. Group of currents are simultaneously injected at SPICE level and their effects are monitored on the cell output. Following an amplitude criterion, output transient duration and associated occurrence probability are recorded. A 130 nm NAND gate from ATMEL Corporation is first used to illustrate the methodology and a comparison between single event transients and multiple event transients effects is presented Finally, results regarding five different combinational cells in the ATMEL 130 nm library are presented and discussed.

This paper presents a new Monte-Carlo methodology to investigate the transient effect occurrence in complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) logic circuits: TMC DASIE (transient Monte-Carlo detailed analysis of secondary ion effects). The production and effects of single-event transients inside CMOS combinational logic gates are examined. First results and perspectives are presented

DASIE (the detailed analysis of secondary ion effect) is the name of a code family dedicated to the SEE rate prediction. This paper presents a review of DASIE code family and its contributions to SEU (single event upset) and MBU (multiple bit upset) understanding.

Neutron induced nuclear reactions are known to be responsible for triggering various failures in microelectronics. Nuclear codes are very useful tools, which allow estimating the production of the secondary ions and finally the way that the component is ionized. In this work we propose to give an overview of the kind of available nuclear codes. We distinguish determinist codes from Monte Carlo ones and explained why these latter are the best adapted for the study of neutron induced failures in microcircuits.