1 Introduction
Low cost and high-performance System-on-a-Chips (SoCs) can be manufactured easily but often without satisfying the requirements of dependable computing. In fact, the more the process technology scales and the feature sizes shrink, the more the circuits will become susceptible to transient faults. Several factors, including high operating frequency, low voltage levels, small noise margins, and reduced logic depth contribute to this increased susceptibility to such faults. Although these faults do not produce permanent damage, they can severely limit the reliability of electronic systems. In addition, current studies indicate that circuits are becoming increasingly sensitive to temporary faults caused by terrestrial cosmic rays and alpha particles, and that this will result in unacceptable soft-error rates (SERs) even in mainstream commercial electronics [1] [2].