A Novel Radiation-Hardened CCDM-TSPC Compared with Seven Well-Known RHBD Flip-Flops in 180 nm CMOS Process

Abstract

Numerous radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) flip-flops have been developed to increase the dependability of digital chips for space applications over the past two decades. In this paper, the radiation immunity and performance of seven well-known RHBD flip-flops are discussed. A novel cross-connected dual modular redundant true single-phase clock (TSPC) D flip-flop (CCDM-TSPC) is proposed. The presented CCDM-TSPC replaces the typical master-slave D flip-flop (MS-DFF) with the fundamental TSPC structure to shorten the circuit’s propagation time. All sensitive points in the circuit are radiation-hardened by using means of cross-connection. The simulation results of the SPECTRE tool show that CCDM-TSPC is completely immune to single-event upsets (SEUs). CCDM-TSPC reduces the C-Q delay by 75% and the layout area by 85% compared with the traditional triple modular redundancy D flip-flop (TMR-DFF).