Threat of soft errors

With aggressive technology scaling, the soft error rate in even earth-bound embedded systems manufactured in deep sub-nanometer technology is projected to become a serious design consideration. ITRS and many researchers expect the soft error rate to increase exponentially at every technology. A high-energy radiation particle, e.g., an alpha particle, a neutron, or a free proton, may strike the diffusion region of a CMOS transistor and produce a charge, resulting in toggling the logic value of the gates or flip-flops. This phenomenon of change in a transistor's logic state is called a soft error or transient fault.