DocumentCode :
747497
Title :
Circuit-Level Design Approaches for Radiation-Hard Digital Electronics
Author :
Garg, Rajesh ; Jayakumar, Nikhil ; Khatri, Sunil P. ; Choi, Gwan S.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Texas A&M Univ., College Station, TX
Volume :
17
Issue :
6
fYear :
2009
fDate :
6/1/2009 12:00:00 AM
Firstpage :
781
Lastpage :
792
Abstract :
In this paper, we present a novel circuit design approach for radiation hardened digital electronics. Our approach is based on the use of shadow gates, whose task it is to protect the primary gate in case it is struck by a heavy cosmic ion. We locally duplicate the gate to be protected, and connect a pair of diode-connected transistors (or diodes) between the outputs of the original and shadow gates. These transistors turn on when the voltages of the two gates deviate during a radiation strike. Our experiments show that at the level of a single gate, our circuit structure has a delay overhead about 1.76% on average, and an area overhead of 277%. At the circuit level, however, we do not need to protect all gates. We present a methodology to selectively protect specific gates of the circuit in a manner that guarantees radiation tolerance for the entire circuit. With this methodology, we demonstrate that at the circuit level, the average delay overhead is about 3% and the average placed-and-routed area overhead is 28%, compared to an unprotected circuit (for delay mapped designs). We also propose an improved circuit protection algorithm to reduce the area overhead associated with our approach. With this approach for circuit protection, the area and delay overheads are further lowered.
Keywords :
digital circuits; diodes; network synthesis; radiation hardening (electronics); transistors; average delay overhead; average placed-and-routed area overhead; circuit protection algorithm; circuit-level design; diode-connected transistors; diodes; heavy cosmic ion; radiation-hard digital electronics; shadow gates; Design; radiation-hard; reliability; single event upsets (SEUs); soft errors;
fLanguage :
English
Journal_Title :
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, IEEE Transactions on
Publisher :
ieee
ISSN :
1063-8210
Type :
jour
DOI :
10.1109/TVLSI.2008.2006795
Filename :
4837774
Link To Document :
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