High performance energy efficient radiation hardened latch for low voltage applications

Abstract

Energy efficiency is considered to be the most critical design parameter for IoT and other ultra low power applications. However, energy efficient circuits show a lesser immunity against soft error, because of the smaller device node capacitances in nanoscale technologies and near-threshold voltage operation. Due to these reasons, the tolerance of the sequential circuits to SEUs is an important consideration in nanoscale near threshold CMOS design. This paper presents an energy efficient SEU tolerant latch. The proposed latch improves the SEU tolerance by using a clocked Muller- C and memory elements based restorer circuit. The parasitic extracted simulations using STMicroelectronics 65 nm CMOS technology show that by employing the proposed latch, an average improvement of ∼40% in energy delay product (EDP), is obtained over the recently reported latch. Moreover, the proposed latch is also validated in a TCAD calibrated PTM 32 nm framework and PTM 22 nm CMOS technology nodes. In 32 nm and 22 nm technologies, the proposed latch improves the EDP ∼12% and 59% over existing latches respectively.