The Use of Entropy to Estimate the Effects of Radiation in Digital Circuits

Reducing transistors' technology nodes makes them more susceptible to faults, such as those caused by radiation effects and manufacturing process variability. In most cases, simulations are used to analyze such effects, but simulations have high computational costs. This work aims to use the concept of circuit entropy to estimate the effects of single-event transients (SETs) and single-event upsets (SEUs) in combinational circuits and static random-access memory (SRAM), respectively. The proposed method presents lower computational complexity compared to the traditional simulations. The method has a factor of 2<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</sup> less complexity, where <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$n$</tex> is the number of inputs to the combinational circuit, resulting in a shorter execution time. The method is also faster for detecting SEUs in memories, as it only has one cycle, whereas traditional methods use binary search. Finally, the method obtains results similar to those of traditional methods.