Radiation Tolerant Memory Cell for Aerospace Applications

Abstract

Radiation-induced single-event upsets (SEUs), or soft errors, cause a significant threat to the reliability of nanoscale memories. In this paper, we have proposed a 10-T radiation-hardened SRAM cell with exceptionally high radiation tolerance. The proposed cell has significantly better performance in terms of radiation robustness as compared to other existing radiation-hardened SRAM cells. Comparisons of several hardened memory cells in terms of access time (read access time and write access time), stability (read static noise margin, write margin, and hold static noise margin), power consumption (read power, write power, and hold power), and layout area is done. From these comparisons, it can be concluded that the proposed cell has better or comparable performance for all the parameters, except for write access time (TWA). The write access time is longer for the proposed cell as compared to other comparison cells. Furthermore, the effect of supply voltage variation has also been studied by calculating and comparing all the parameters at different supply voltages. Monte Carlo simulations are also used for some of the parameters to evaluate the effects of process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations.