ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the issue of soft errors on digital circuits focusing on ad hoc protection techniques that are illustrated using digital lters as a case study. It starts with a review of soft errors, covering how they are produced. Then different types of errors, both destructive and nondestructive, are reviewed. In the second part of the chapter, several methodologies to detect errors and measure the system reliability are described, together with the most usual techniques to protect digital circuits against soft errors. As a continuation to these, some ad hoc techniques for digital lters are presented as a case study in the last part of the chapter. These techniques show that efcient protection can be achieved with low overhead by exploiting the lter structure and the application requirements in terms of fault tolerance.
