Search Results (8)

With advances in space, nuclear, and defense industries, the susceptibility of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) to radiation has increased. Radiation-induced degradation and malfunctioning of IC performance can lead to system failure, leading to significant damage. To address this limitation, this study employed mixed-stage modeling and simulation (M&S) techniques to evaluate the reliability of complementary metal-oxide semiconductor application-specific ICs (ASICs) in radiation environments. Radiation-hardened IC chips were designed and fabricated using layout modification techniques based on M&S. The ASIC, which includes the D-latch and Operational Amplifier (Op-Amp) circuits, was validated for resistance up to a total ionizing dose of 20 kGy(Si). The proposed radiation-hardened ICs demonstrated stable performance even in radiation-exposed environments, ensuring reliable operation under such conditions. The findings provide insights into overcoming radiation-induced degradation and malfunction in semiconductor integrated circuits, which is particularly relevant for advancing space, nuclear, and defense industries. Full article

The digital integrated circuit (IC) design industry is continuously evolving. However, the rapid advancements in technology are accompanied by major reliability concerns. Conventional clock-based synchronous designs become exceedingly susceptible to transient errors, caused by radiation rays, power jitters, electromagnetic interferences (EMIs), and/or other noise sources, primarily due to aggressive device and voltage scaling. quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) asynchronous (clockless) circuits demonstrate inherent robustness against such transient errors, owing to their unique architecture. However, they are not completely immune. This article presents a hardened QDI Sleep Convention Logic (SCL) asynchronous architecture, which can fully recover from radiation-induced single-event effects such as single-event upset (SEU) and single-event latch-up (SEL). Multiple benchmark circuits are designed based on the proposed architecture. The simulation results indicate that the proposed designs offer substantial energy savings per operation, dissipate substantially less power during idle phases, and have lower area footprints in comparison to designs based on an existing resilient Null Convention Logic (NCL) architecture at the cost of increased latency. In addition, a formal verification framework for the proposed architecture is also presented. The performance and scalability of the proposed verification scheme are demonstrated using several multiplier benchmark circuits of varying width. Full article

D flip-flop (DFF) is the basic unit of sequential logic in digital circuits. However, because of an internal cross-coupled inverter pair, it can easily appear as a single event upset (SEU) when hit by high-energy particles, resulting in the error in the value stored in the flip-flop. On this basis, a new structure D flip-flop is proposed in this paper. This flip-flop uses an asymmetric scheme in which the master–slave latch adopts different hardening structures. By sacrificing circuit speed in exchange for stronger SEU fortification capability, the SEU threshold of this structure is improved by 10 times compared to traditional D flip-flops. It has also been compared with Dual Interlocked Storage Elements (DICEs), and it saves the area cost of six transistors compared to the DICE structure. Under the same operating conditions, the average power consumption and peak power consumption are, respectively, 9.8% and 18.8% lower than those of the DICE circuit, making it suitable for soft radiation environments where high circuit speed is not a critical requirement. Full article

In aerospace environments, high reliability and low power consumption of chips are essential. To greatly reduce power consumption, the latches of a chip need to enter the power down operation. In this operation, employing non-volatile (NV) latches can retain circuit states. Moreover, a latch can be hit by a radiative particle in the aerospace environment, which can cause a severe soft error in the worst case. This paper presents a NV-latch based on resistive random-access memories (ReRAMs) for NV and robust applications. The proposed NV-latch is radiation-hardened with low overhead and can restore values after power down operation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed NV-latch can completely provide radiation hardening capability against single-event upsets (SEUs) and can restore values after power down operation. The proposed NV-latch can reduce the number of transistors in the storage cells by 50% on average compared with the other similar solutions. Full article

Due to aggressive scaling down, multiple-node-upset hardened design has become a major concern regarding radiation hardening. The proposed latch overcomes the architecture and performance limitations of state-of-the-art double-node-upset (DNU)-resilient latches. A novel stacked latch element is developed with multiple thresholds, regular architecture, increased number of single-event upset (SEU)-insensitive nodes, low power dissipation, and high robustness. The radiation-aware layout considering layout-level issues is also proposed. Compared with state-of-the-art DNU-resilient latches, simulation results show that the proposed latch exhibits up to 92% delay and 80% power reduction in data activity ratio (DAR) of 100%. The radiation simulation using the dual-double exponential current source model shows that the proposed latch has the strongest radiation-hardening capability among the other DNU-resilient latches. Full article

To avoid soft errors in integrated circuits, this paper presents two high-performance latch designs, namely LOCDNUTRL and LOCTNUTRL, protecting against double-node upset (DNU) and triple-node upset (TNU) in the harsh radiation environment. First, the LOCDNUTRL latch consists of two single-node upset (SNU) self-recovery modules and uses a C-element at the output. Next, based on the LOCDNUTRL latch, the LOCTNUTRL latch is proposed, which uses five extra inverters to fully tolerate TNU. Unlike the LOCDNUTRL latch, which uses an output level C-element as a voter, LOCTNUTRL is insensitive to the high-impedance state (HIS), making it more reliable for aerospace applications. The HSPICE simulation results, using a predictive technology model, show that the LOCTNUTRL latch saves 57.74% delay, 7.7% power consumption, 11.74% area cost, and 63.59% power delay production (PDP) on average compared with the state-of-the-art hardened latches. The process, voltage, and temperature variation analysis show that the proposed two latches are less sensitive to changes. Full article

A single event causing a double-node upset is likely to occur in nanometric complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS). Contemporary hardened latch designs are insufficient in meeting high reliability, low power consumption, and low delay. This paper presents a novel soft error hardened latch, known as a loop interlocked hardened latch (LIHL). This latch consists of four modified cross-coupled elements, based on dual interlocked storage cell (DICE) latch. The use of these elements hardens the proposed LIHL to soft errors. The simulation results showed that the LIHL has single-event double upset (SEDU) self-recoverability and single-event transient (SET) pulse filterability. This latch also reduces power dissipation and propagation delay, compared to other SEDU or SET-tolerant latches. Full article

Due to the reduction in technology scaling, gate capacitance and charge storage in sensitive nodes are rapidly decreasing, making Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuits more sensitive to soft errors caused by radiation. In this paper, a low-power and high-speed single event upset radiation hardened latch is proposed. The proposed latch can withstand single event upsets completely when the high energy particle hit on any one of its intermediate nodes. The proposed latch structure comprises of four CMOS feedback schemes and a Muller C-element with clock gating technique. For the sake of comparison, the proposed and the existing latches in the literature are implemented in 45nm CMOS technology. From the post layout simulation results, it may be noted that the proposed latch achieves 8% low power consumption, 95% less delay, and a 94% reduction in power-delay-product compared to the existing single event upset resilient and single event tolerant latches. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed latch is less sensitive to process, voltage, and temperature variations in comparison with the existing hardened latches in the literature. Full article