A novel, highly SEU tolerant digital circuit design approach

In this paper, we present a new radiation tolerant CMOS standard cell library, and demonstrate its effectiveness in implementing radiation hardened digital circuits. We exploit the fact that if a gate is implemented using only PMOS (NMOS) transistors then a radiation particle strike can result only in logic a 0 to 1 (1 to 0) flip. Based on this observation, we derive our radiation hardened gates from regular static CMOS gates. In particular, we separate the PMOS and NMOS devices, and split the gate output into two signals. One of these outputs of our radiation tolerant gate is generated using PMOS transistors, and it drives other PMOS transistors (only) in its fanout. Similarly, the other output (generated from NMOS transistors) drives only other NMOS transistors in its fanout. Now, if a radiation particle strikes one of the outputs of the radiation tolerant gate, then the gates in the fanout enter a high-impedance state, and hence preserve their output values. Our radiation hardened gates exhibit an extremely high degree of SEU tolerance, which is validated at the circuit level. Using these gates, we also implement circuit level hardening based on logical masking, to selectively harden those gates in a circuit which contribute most to the soft error failure of the circuit. The gates with a low probability of logical masking are replaced by SEU tolerant gates from our new library, such that the digital design achieves a 90% soft error rate reduction. Experimental results demonstrate that this reduction is achieved with a modest layout area and delay penalty of 62% and 29% respectively, for area mapped designs. In contrast with existing approaches, our approach results in SEU immunity for extremely large critical charge values (>650fC).