Novel Radiation-Hardened-by-Design (RHBD) 12T Memory Cell for Aerospace Applications in Nanoscale CMOS Technology

TLDR

The authors propose a novel 12T radiation‑hardened memory cell that tolerates single and multiple node upsets. The design exploits the physical upset mechanism of soft errors and incorporates a robust layout topology. Verification shows the 12T cell achieves strong radiation robustness, reduces area and power by 18.9 % and 23.8 % relative to the 13T design, incurs a 171.6 %/50.0 % read/write time overhead, and offers a 986.2 mV hold static noise margin, indicating superior stability and fault‑tolerance capability.

Abstract

In this paper, a novel radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) 12T memory cell is proposed to tolerate single node upset and multiple-node upset based on upset physical mechanism behind soft errors together with reasonable layout-topology. The verification results obtained confirm that the proposed 12T cell can provide a good radiation robustness. Compared with 13T cell, the increased area, power, read/write access time overheads of the proposed 12T cell are -18.9%, -23.8%, and 171.6%/-50.0%, respectively. Moreover, its hold static noise margin is 986.2 mV which is higher than that of 13T cell. This means that the proposed 12T cell also has higher stability when it provides fault tolerance capability.