Comparison of heavy-ion induced SEU for D- and TMR-flip-flop designs in 65-nm bulk CMOS technology

Abstract

Heavy ion experiments were performed on D flip-flop (DFF) and TMR flip-flop (TMRFF) fabricated in a 65-nm bulk CMOS process. The experiment results show that TMRFF has about 92% decrease in SEU crosssection compared to the standard DFF design in static test mode. In dynamic test mode, TMRFF shows much stronger frequency dependency than the DFF design, which reduces its advantage over DFF at higher operation frequency. At 160 MHz, the TMRFF is only 3.2× harder than the standard DFF. Such small improvement in the SEU performance of the TMR design may warrant reconsideration for its use in hardening design.

MSIFF: A radiation-hardened flip-flop via interleaving master-slave stage layout topology

“…The static test mode with solid 0 and solid 1 data patterns was used to estimate the intrinsic SEU sensitivity [25,26,27]. In the static test mode, all 0 data (solid 0) or all 1 data (solid 1) was first loaded into three shift register chains.…”

Low power radiation aware transistor level design using tri‐state inverter embedded non‐clock gating technique

“…The basic sampling, keeper circuit, and C-element parts are used to implement the hybrid FF. From related works [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], authors have focused to discuss the SEE effects only, another solution is C-element, which is proposed in [35] to overcome the SEE effects such as SET, and SEU in hybrid FF design. The hybrid pulsed FF, using C-element as a fundamental stage, provides better result to resist switching activity and improves data activity.…”

“…From related works, the sequential CMOS circuits are affected by SEU [26–28, 31, 34] and SET [28–30, 33]. The sources of these effects are introduced from radiation errors.…”

“…He , et al [28] investigated the single‐event vulnerability of unhardened DFF and implement triple modular redundancy FF (TMRFF) using 65‐nm bulk CMOS technology. The heavy ions show a limited advantage of the TMRFF over the DFF because of charge sharing.…”

Categorization and SEU Fault Simulations of Radiation-Hardened-by-Design Flip-Flops

“…RHBD FFs, in this review, are classified into three different categories; they are spatial redundancy FF that makes different copies of the same FF in space [1,[6][7][8][9], temporal redundancy FF that compares the signal at different times by adding some delay [10][11][12][13][14], and node hardening FF that strengthens the internal nodes of the FFs and protects them from flipping by soft errors [4,[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Additionally, some FFs can be categorized into multiple categories such as spatial-temporal redundancy FF [7,[23][24][25][26] or node hardening FF with spatial/temporal redundancy [27,28].…”