Mitigating the thermally induced single event crosstalk

Abstract

With advances in technology scaling, circuits become increasingly more sensitive to transient pulses caused by single event (SE) particles. With scaling, interconnects are also being laid closer to each other causing increased cross-coupling noise effects. Due to strong coupling among wires, SE transients can easily contaminate electronically unrelated circuit paths via SE crosstalk noise effects increasing SE susceptibility of CMOS circuits. This work reports that varying temperature profiles on nearby interconnects can further alleviate SE crosstalk noise effects. The increased temperature affects both interconnect resistance and driving strength of transistors. If temperature induced effects are not properly considered, standard measures taken such as driver sizing may fail causing a new reliability issue. This work first discusses these effects and then proposes a mitigation method for thermally induced SE crosstalk based on adaptive body biasing of driver transistors and a temperature sensor. Simulation results demonstrate that, the proposed method can successfully mitigate thermally induced crosstalk noise by 86% on average.