Design of High-Reliability Memory Cell to Mitigate Single Event Multiple Node Upsets

As technology scaling down, the sensitivity of SRAM cells to radiation-induced Single Event Upsets (SEUs) increases, and Single Event Multiple Node Upsets (SEMNUs) due to charge sharing has also become one of the major concerns in memory cell designs. In this paper, a high-reliability radiation hard...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on circuits and systems. I, Regular papers Vol. 68; no. 10; pp. 4170 - 4181
Main Authors Li, Hongchen, Xiao, Liyi, Qi, Chunhua, Li, Jie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 01.10.2021
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Access time
CAD
Computer aided design
Integrated circuit modeling
Integrated circuit reliability
Mixed mode simulation
Power consumption
Radiation
Radiation effects
Radiation hardened by design
Radiation hardening
Radiation hardening (electronics)
Random access memory
Reliability
Robustness
single even multiple node upsets (SEMNUs)
Single event upsets
single event upsets (SEUs)
SRAM bit-cell
Transient analysis
Transistors
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Summary:As technology scaling down, the sensitivity of SRAM cells to radiation-induced Single Event Upsets (SEUs) increases, and Single Event Multiple Node Upsets (SEMNUs) due to charge sharing has also become one of the major concerns in memory cell designs. In this paper, a high-reliability radiation hardened memory cell (RH-14T) is proposed to mitigate SEMNUs. SPICE simulations and 3D technology computer aided design mixed-mode simulations were performed to verify the high robustness of the RH-14T cell to SEUs. Compared with previous radiation hardened memory cells, the proposed RH-14T cell has similar read access time, smaller write access time, and the read access time and write access time are less sensitive to process variations. The Read Static Noise Margin (RSNM) and Write Margin (WM) of the RH-14T cell are larger than those of the unhardened conventional 6T SRAM cell. The improvement of reliability is often a trade-off with area, power consumption and performance. In order to achieve high reliability, the RH-14T cell employs more transistors, so it has 1.5 times the power consumption overhead of 6T and a larger area penalty.
ISSN:1549-8328
1558-0806
DOI:10.1109/TCSI.2021.3100900