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In this paper, the radiation response of a single-event tolerant flip-flop design named the Quatro flip-flop is presented. Circuit level simulations on the flip-flop design show 1) the critical charge of the sensitive nodes to be greater than that of DICE flip-flop, 2) the number of sensitive nodes and the sensitive area to be fewer than that of DICE flip-flop. A test-chip designed and fabricated at the 40-nm bulk CMOS technology node consisting of Quatro, DICE, and standard D-flip-flops was used for heavy-ions, neutrons, and alpha particles exposures. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance of the Quatro flip-flop design over conventional DICE and D-flip-flop designs.Index Terms-Charge sharing, flip-flops, radiation-hardened-by-design, redundancy-based radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD), single event, soft error rate (SER).

In modern CMOS processes, soft errors and metastability are two prominent failure mechanisms. Radiation induced single event upsets, or soft-errors, have become a dominant failure mechanism in sub-100 nm CMOS memory and logic circuits. The effects of metastability have also becoming increasingly significant in high-speed applications implemented in nanometric processes. In this paper the design trade-offs for flip-flops between performance, soft-error robustness and metastability are described. Soft-error robust flip-flops are implemented based on both the DICE cell and the Quatro cell. SPICE simulations are used to characterize the transient performance and metastability robustness, and device level simulations were performed to quantify the soft-error robustness. The flip-flops were fabricated in the TSMC 40 nm process and radiation measurements were performed at several test facilities. The Quatro flip-flop showed improved soft-error robustness and metastability when compared with a reference D flip-flop and a DICE flip-flop.