Investigation of system-level ESD induced soft failures

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) is a common phenomenon that can have negative implications for the performance of systems during operation. ESD is a brief, high-current stress that when applied to a functional system, can cause a variety of problems ranging from temporary system malfunction to permanent failure of components within the system and/or the system itself. Permanent failure of components, also known as hard failure, is a well-studied area among the ESD community with established practices in place for mitigating the stress and improving the reliability of the system. While further improvements with regard to hard-failure protection can always be made, this work will focus on the aspects of soft failures. Soft failures encompass any type of disruption to the system that, in general, can be recovered from, for example by powercycling the system. An example of a soft failure could be the erasure of data within some memory elements of an embedded computer that cause programmed routines to fail. By restarting the system, the data will be regenerated and written into the memory elements and proper functionality is returned. While seemingly innocuous, the temporary failure of crucial systems, for example medical or automotive systems, could lead to severe consequences. This dissertation surveys the type of sensitive logic that could be susceptible to soft failures. Custom hardware which utilizes these elements has been designed and fabricated. Experiments with this hardware has yielded evidence of soft failures and lead to a preliminary understanding of the mechanisms responsible for those soft failures. While strong support for these hypothesized mechanisms has been obtained, future work must be completed to ascertain the validity of the conclusions drawn from the preliminary results.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical & Computer Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2017

Author dc:creator

• Thomson, Nicholas Adam

Contributors dc:contributor

• Rosenbaum, Elyse
• Chen, Deming
• Gong, Songbin
• Schutt-Ainé, José

• Electrostatic discharge (ESD)
• System-level
• Soft failures

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2017 Nicholas Thomson

Language dc:language

en

Handle dc:identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97379

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/97379