Selective Hardening: Toward Cost-Effective Error Tolerance

As ICs shrink into the nanometer range, they are increasingly subject to errors induced by physical faults. Traditional hardening for error mitigation consumes too much area and energy to be cost-effective in commercial applications. Selective hardening, applied only to a design's most error-sensitive parts, offers an attractive alternative. This article reviews recently proposed techniques to selectively harden nanoelectronics and achieve very low error levels.