Exploring subsets of standard cell libraries to exploit natural fault masking capabilities for reliable logic

Deep submicron technology is expected to be plagued by many reliability issues including soft errors in logic. To address this, we demonstrate how exploiting the natural fault masking characteristics of logical functions can be achieved by exploring the design space for selecting subsets of cells from within a cell library prior to synthesis. Subset selection alone is shown to improve the reliability of combinational logic circuits by more than 35%. We compare how subset libraries effect the trade-offs between reliability, area, power, and performance. Further, we show that added benefits of reduced cell library size can benefit the design.