Radiation-Hardened, Read-Disturbance-Free New-Quatro-10T Memory Cell for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Soft error protection is a paramount requirement for memories exposed to radiation environment. To satisfy the demand, a radiation-hardened new-quatro 10T memory cell is proposed in this brief, which is immune to single-node upset and also has high resilience to multinode upset while features read-disturbance-free benefiting from its internal quad-node interlocked feedback mechanism. Simulation results show that it provides ample radiation robustness to single event and gives $1.75\times $ improvements in multinode upset tolerance when compared with the previous 12T dual-interlocked storage cell (DICE-12T) bitcell, signifying the higher fault tolerance capability. In addition, the proposed design also achieves $6.48\times $ enhancement in read noise margin when compared with the DICE-12T bitcell while compromising only $2.1\times $ larger area than a reference 6T cell based on a 65-nm logic design rule, exhibiting the superiority in read stability.