Design of radiation-hardened memory cell by polar design for space applications

Abstract

This paper proposed a radiation-hardened memory cell (RHMC12T) by polar design for space applications. The proposed cell has the following advantages: (1) it can tolerate all single-node upset and partial double-node upset based on combining radiation hardened by polar design technology together with reasonable layout topology; (2) comparing with the state-of-the-art radiation hardened SRAM cells, simulation results show the proposed RHMC12T cell has lower write access time , higher wordline write trip voltage, larger static noise margin, and larger critical charge. And Monte Carlo simulation results have shown that RHMC12T has good robustness; (3) electrical quality metric is widely used to evaluate the overall performance of SRAM cells. And RHMC12T has the largest EQM compared with the state-of-the-art radiation hardened SRAM cells, which suggests the proposed RHMC12T exhibits good circuit performance (including write/read access time, static noise margin et al.) as well as good radiation resistance performance with sacrificing a large area overhead.