Abstract: Single-event transient susceptibility of phase-locked loops has been investigated. The charge pump is the most sensitive component of the PLL to SET, and it is hard to mitigate this effect at the transistor level. A test circuit was designed on a 65 nm process using a new system-level radiation-hardening-by-design technique. Heavy-ion testing was used to evaluate the radiation hardness. Analyses and discussion of the feasibility of this method are also presented.

Key words: phase locked loop (PLL), radiation effect, single-event transient (SET), radiation-hardening-by-design (RHBD)