A highly reliable and low-overhead quadruple-node-upset tolerant latch design

Abstract

With the advancement of semiconductor technology and the continual reduction in the feature size of transistors within integrated circuits (ICs), ICs are becoming more and more vulnerable to soft errors induced by energetic particles in harsh radiation environments. To mitigate the impact of soft error on ICs. This paper proposes a quadruple-node-upset tolerant latch (LCQNUT), which consists of two parts: a storage module and a three-stage interception module. The storage module is composed of 12 dual-input inverters. The three-stage interception module is composed of 6 dual-input C-elements (CEs). Based on the CEs and dual-input inverters' blocking capability, the proposed LCQNUT latch can efficiently tolerate the simultaneous upset of any four internal node combinations. Simulation results indicate the proposed LCQNUT latch has the smallest power consumption, area overhead, and area-power-delay product (APDP) compared to the latches with the same soft tolerance ability (D-LATCH, HS-QNU, QNUTL). It has moderate sensitivity to process, voltage, and temperature (PVT).