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ABSTRACT

Soft errors are functional failures resulting from the latching of single-event transients (transient voltage fluctuations at a logic node or SETs) caused by high-energy particle strikes or electrical noise. Due to technology scaling and reduced supply voltages, they are expected to increase by several orders of magnitude in logic circuits. Both combinational and sequential logic circuits are expected to be affected. Many different latch designs to prevent soft errors due to particle strikes on the latch nodes have been proposed. We review these designs and compare them based on their robustness and their power and performance overheads. We also propose new latch designs, the best of which is vulnerable only to a single-event, multiple-upset without any delay overhead and consumes only 40% power of a standard latch. We expect this work will help designers to select latches for applications where soft error is an important design metric.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.8 Performance and Reliability
      B.8.1 Reliability, Testing, and Fault-Tolerance

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
latch, multiple-upset, radiation hardening, single-event, single-event upset, soft errors