Design of an Energy-Efficient Radiation-Hardened Non-Volatile Magnetic Latch

Abstract

By scaling down the technology node to the deep nanoscale, the vulnerability of digital circuits to radiation and the intensive increase of leakage power have become of concern. Accordingly, designing radiation-hardened (rad-hard) memory elements based on non-volatile devices such as magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) is a promising approach to address these issues. This study proposes a novel robust and energy-efficient rad-hard latch based on a new C-element-based keeper. Moreover, the proposed rad-hard latch is employed to design a highly reliable non-volatile magnetic latch using MTJs. The proposed latches can also be exploited to form a rad-hard magnetic master–slave flip-flop. Simulations based on the 14 nm FinFET and the spin Hall effect (SHE)-assisted perpendicular MTJ models suggest that the proposed designs offer advantageous figures of merit over the prior works. Specifically, the proposed circuits offer up to 52% and 82% improvements in power and delay, respectively, when compared to their state-of-the-art counterparts. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations validate the robust operation of the proposed design in the presence of process variations.