Radiation Hardened Click Controllers for Soft Error Resilient Asynchronous Architectures

Abstract

Ensuring modern VLSI systems are resilient to soft errors resulting from radiation effects continues to be a challenging problem. Traditional Radiation Hardened by Design (RHBD) approaches typically have high costs in terms of area, power, and/or performance overheads. In recent years, pairing RHBD with asynchronous design has emerged as a potential solution to reduce these overheads and improve efficiency. In this paper, a generalized method for hardening asynchronous Click-based controllers is introduced, where a combination of spatial redundancy and Guard Gate (GG) is used to mitigate Single Event Transients (SET) and Single Event Upsets (SEUs). Two Click controllers that can benefit from the RHBD methodology are presented, each one targeting a recently proposed soft error resilient asynchronous architecture, the Soft Error Resilient Asynchronous Design (SERAD) and the Asynchronous Full Error Detection and Correction (AFEDC). We have implemented the different controllers using a 130nm cell library. Results show the correctness and resilience to SET and SEU events. Additionally, the proposed RHBD templates require less area and power overheads when compared to the Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) implementation for equivalent fault coverage.