Radiation hardened Flip-Flop design for super and sub threshold voltage operation

A novel energy efficient, Single Event Upset (SEU)/Single Event Transient (SET) tolerant Flip-Flop (FF) design is proposed which is suitable for ultra-low power systems that operate between sub-threshold (250mV) and super-threshold (1.0V) supply voltages. In comparison to an existing sense-amplifier based radhard FF, the proposed FF provides equivalent SEU/SET resilience at super-threshold voltage (1.0V) while reducing power consumption by 40%. For sub-threshold operation at 250mV, the proposed FF is approximately five times more robust to external injected charge as compared to the sense-amplifier based FF and shows improved energy-delay product over a wide range of sub-threshold voltage operation (250mV - 500mV). The proposed FF is designed and simulated with 45nm IBM12SOI fully-depleted models.