Design and Analysis of Leakage-Induced False Error Tolerant Error Detecting Latch for Sub/Near-Threshold Applications

Abstract

The digital designs operating in sub/near-threshold region are susceptible to timing errors due to the extreme impact of process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations. This paper proposes a new error-detecting latch (EDL) to mitigate the impact of PVT variations. The proposed EDL is a single-phase clocked design, which significantly reduces the clock power consumption of the design. The proposed EDL follows a merged and shared architecture of two latches along with an XNOR gate, which leads to a compact layout of EDL. The post-layout simulations in an industrial 28 nm CMOS technology node, show a minimum clock power savings of 31%, average power savings of 16%, and reduction in leakage power by 23% in comparison to the state-of-the-art EDLs at 0.4 V. The 10K rigorous Monte-Carlo simulations across the supply voltage range of 0.23 V - 0.8 V and clock frequency range of 1.6 MHz - 70 MHz shows that the proposed EDL is tolerant to leakage-induced false errors and glitches. SSEDL is robust to process variations even with minimum-sized transistors.