Circuit and Layout Techniques for Soft-error-resilient Digital CMOS Circuits

Download or read book Circuit and Layout Techniques for Soft-error-resilient Digital CMOS Circuits written by Hsiao-Heng Kelin Lee and published by Stanford University. This book was released on 2011 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radiation-induced soft errors are a major concern for modern digital circuits, especially memory elements. Unlike large Random Access Memories that can be protected using error-correcting codes and bit interleaving, soft error protection of sequential elements, i.e. latches and flip-flops, is challenging. Traditional techniques for designing soft-error-resilient sequential elements generally address single node errors, or Single Event Upsets (SEUs). However, with technology scaling, the charge deposited by a single particle strike can be simultaneously collected and shared by multiple circuit nodes, resulting in Single Event Multiple Upsets (SEMUs). In this work, we target SEMUs by presenting a design framework for soft-error-resilient sequential cell design with an overview of existing circuit and layout techniques for soft error mitigation, and introducing a new soft error resilience layout design principle called LEAP, or Layout Design through Error-Aware Transistor Positioning. We then discuss our application of LEAP to the SEU-immune Dual Interlocked Storage Cell (DICE) by implementing a new sequential element layout called LEAP-DICE, retaining the original DICE circuit topology. We compare the soft error performance of SEU-immune flip-flops with the LEAP-DICE flip-flop using a test chip in 180nm CMOS under 200-MeV proton radiation and conclude that 1) our LEAP-DICE flip-flop encounters on average 2,000X and 5X fewer errors compared to a conventional D flip-flop and our reference DICE flip-flop, respectively; 2) our LEAP-DICE flip-flop has the best soft error performance among all existing SEU-immune flip-flops; 3) In the evaluation of our design framework, we also discovered new soft error effects related to operating conditions such as voltage scaling, clock frequency setting and radiation dose.