Novel radiation-hardened SRAM for immune soft-error in space-radiation environments

Abstract

As the feature size of transistors scaling down, the integration density of memory circuits such as Static random access memory (SRAM) cells increases, and they are more sensitive to Single event effect (SEE). The Single event multiple node upset (SEMNUs) caused by charge sharing effect is becoming a major concern in memory circuit design. In this paper, a new radiation-hardened SRAM cell (NRHC-14T) is proposed on the basis of considering the radiation-hardened and the operating performance of the basic circuit. The circuit uses polarity hardening technology to reduce the number of sensitive nodes, and can recover from Dual-node upset (DNU) on the basis of all single-node upset (SNU) recovery. Compared to other radiation-hardened cells, NRHC-14T cell than We-Quatro, DICE, SAR14T, RSP14T, RHPD-12T, QUCCE12T, and SEA14T increased by 60.12 %, 9.22 %, 21.39 %, 84.34 %, 17.92 %, 100.58 %, and 129.48 % of the writing speed, and saved by 34.28 %, 57.14 %, 22.85 %, 11.43 %, 68.57 %, 34.28 %, and 79.99 % of the power consumption, respectively. In addition, NRHC-14T has better stability, the highest Critical charge (Qcrit) and the best overall performance. The cell proposed in this paper can be well used to aerospace electronic devices and work stably in space radiation environment by virtue of its excellent radiation-hardened ability and good overall performance.