Soft-Error Tolerance Depending on Supply Voltage by Heavy Ions on Radiation-Hardened Flip Flops in a 65 nm Bulk Process

Abstract

We evaluated soft-error tolerance by heavy ions on several types of flip flops (FFs) called transmission-gate FF (TGFF), Dual Interlocked Storage Cell FF (DICEFF), Bistable Cross-coupled Dual Modular Redundancy FF (BCDMRFF) and BCDMRFF with Set and Reset (BCDMRFFSR) in a 65 nm bulk process. Radiation-hardened FFs are stronger against soft errors than a standard TGFF by two or three order of magnitude. DICEFF has higher soft-error tolerance than BCDMRFF by low-LET heavy ions less than 40 MeV-cm2/mg, while BCDMRFF is stronger against soft error than DICEFF by high-LET ions over 40 MeV-cm2/mg. DICEFF becomes weaker by lowering supply voltage, while BCDMRFF has higher soft-error tolerance than DICEFF when supply voltages is less than 1.0 V.