Abstract: Due to aggressive technology scaling, radiation-induced soft errors have become a serious reliability concern in VLSI chip design. This paper presents a novel radiation hardened by design latch with high single-event-upset (SEU) immunity. The proposed latch can effectively mitigate SEU by internal dual interlocked scheme. The propagation delay, power dissipation and power delay product of the presented latch are evaluated by detailed SPICE simulations. Compared with previous SEU-hardening solutions such as TMR-Latch, the presented latch is more area efficient, delay and power efficient. Fault injection simulations also demonstrate the robustness of the presented latch even under high energy particle strikes.

Key words: soft error,  single event upset,  radiation hardened by design latch