A Case for Acoustic Wave Detectors for Soft-Errors

The continuing decrease in dimensions and operating voltage of transistors has increased their sensitivity against radiation phenomena, making soft errors an important challenge in future microprocessors. New techniques for detecting errors in the logic and memories that allow meeting the desired failure rate are key to keep harnessing the benefits of Moore's law. This paper proposes a low-cost dynamic particle strike detection mechanism based on acoustic wave detectors. Our results show that the proposed mechanism can protect the whole chip, including both the logic and the memory arrays, and detect all the soft errors caused by particle strikes with minimal hardware overhead and performance cost.