Radiation-hardened flip-flop for single event upset tolerance

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present a transition detector (TD)-based radiation hardened flip-flop (TDRH-FF) for single event upset (SEU).

Design/methodology/approach

With SEU recovery and single event transient (SET) detector mechanism, the TDRH-FF can tolerate SEU during hold mode and generate a warning signal for architecture-level recovery during transport mode when input signal contains SET. Evaluation results show that the TDRH-FF outperforms comparable comprehensive performance.

Findings

Simulation results show that 1) the mean pulse width of the correction glitches (at full width half maximum) of TDRH-FF is less than 10 ps; 2) the area overhead of TDRH-FF is similar to the EVFERST-FF, BISER-FF and DNURHL-FF; 3) TDRH-FF has the same average power consumption as SETTOF, and moderate PDP and Ps values among these compared FFs.

Originality/value

In this paper, a TD-based TDRH-FF is proposed to solve the problems in the previous design. And the main contributions of the proposed TDRH-FF are summarized: Minimum size transistors are used in the proposed TD which leads to a considerable decrease in area overheads and propagation delay (resulting in an ignorable correction glitch); and compared with other radiation hardened flip-flop, TDRH-FF outperforms comparable comprehensive performance.

Citation

Qi, C., Ma, G., Zhang, Y., Wang, T., Rui, E., Jiao, Q., Liu, C., Huo, M. and Zhai, G. (2023), "Radiation-hardened flip-flop for single event upset tolerance", Microelectronics International, Vol. 40 No. 2, pp. 89-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/MI-06-2022-0110