Laser-Induced Fault Simulation

This paper presents a multi-level simulator for laser-induced fault simulation in digital circuits. It automatically performs the simulation of laser-induced faults using layout information and laser spot information in order to locate affected gates and derive fault-models. The paper mainly focuses on multi-level simulation for obtaining high accuracy of the fault simulation at transistor level and high speed for the simulation of the rest of the circuit. This multi-level process allows handling natural and maliciously induced physical phenomenon leading to circuit misbehavior, while dealing with large circuits.

I. Introduction

The Photoelectric Laser Stimulation (PLS) is a technique that allows injecting photoelectric energy by pulsed laser into the substrate of an electronic device. The injected energy produces photoelectron-hole pairs that can result in a transient fault of the affected logic gates. This method was first used for the simulation of Single Event Effect (SEE) in 1965 [1], because the nature of this fault is similar to the ionization effect generated by energetic particles.